teacher-librarians

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A teacher's guide to Facebook settings.

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).  

Annette Lamb

Abstract Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind (Mar et al., 2006). We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two other important individual differences: the tendency to be drawn into stories and gender. Even after accounting for these variables, fiction exposure still predicted performance on an empathy task. Extending these results, we also found that exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support.

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.

Excellent infographic on the impact of social media on students.

"If you need to design a unit or a course for teaching information fluency, here is a suggested sequence of course activities for middle school and high school (the Basic Course may be adaptedfor grades 4 and 5, described below). As you can see in the tables below, we've structured Basic and Intermediate courses around a series of individual study MicroModules and hands-on Flash challenges. As more activities go online, new options will become available and this list will be updated. Use our list of core competencies to choose activities. "

free games to help learn to search and evaluate the web from the 21st century informaiton fluency project

Internet Search Challenge. Use Google to answer the question:What is the url of a page that lists the number of shows that have opened on Broadway year-by-year since 1984? Time to beat? 10 minutes