Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research  Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold - over a day, a week, a month or more - reflecting the event's actual duration."

K-12 Student Curriculum Free to educators, the CyberSmart! Student Curriculum empowers students to use the Internet safely, responsibly, and effectively.

Might help create a blended classroom, even when you have to share the blender.  Common sense advise for the real world of underequipped classrooms and stretched thin teachers.

The most recent issue of the 21cif Information Fluency newsletter. Feel free to join! Low volume news letter dedicated to searching, evaluating and ethical use of digital information. Includes an invitation for free access to our new 3 hour self paced training course and online assessment: Information Fluency Investigator 3.1.

When is it cheating? When is it collaboration? This thoughtful article from Common Sense Media provides fine advice for parents (or teachers) on how to talk to kids about digital media and ethics.  

Video site dedicated to short instructional tutorials for the technology classroom.  

This is a livebiners presentaion from Carolyn Jo Starkey that presents detailed resources on how the Common Core Standards relate to school library media studies.

primary sources

Primary sources

4 minute podcast.  As always, NPR is great.

The author provides a short history of information discovery that provides a fascinating context for the article.  You see the evolution of web info over the paste decade. You also get some true insight on how to consume information using social tools.  Abundant links to web 2.0 apps make this article well worth the time to read (and re-read it).  

This is an amazing illustration of Sir Kenneth Robinson's presentation on schooling in the 21st century.  It's fascinating to watch an illustrator create a visual map of Robinson's ideas as they are spoken.  The content of the presentation is enormously important to any educator struggling to change the system.  It's even more important to those who've been subdued and mislead by old ideas into thinking they can't learn or create.

A Horn for Louis, how Louis Armstrong found his passion. Great anecdotes about Armstrong, Marc Chagall, and Harry Houdini that lead to Kimmel's books.

This is a terrific mini lesson from Barry Lane. He shows (not tells) how to explode a moment into a full page of rich writing. The visuals in this video will catch any student's attention. I've called this technique the Magnified Moment. It's also tied to the idea of using imaginary binoculars to really see the details of an event. Fun to watch, this video is part of "Barry in a Box", a book and dvd Barry is selling on his website: www.discoverwriting.com