As educators we are faced with the challenge of teaching students to efficiently use the Internet to find and use information. Searching for information and making sense of it is a process that involves critical thinking and it is an important skill. Fortunately, there are many free digital tools available to help students efficiently sift through an overwhelming abundance of web content to find the relevant and reliable information they need. This post will explore some digital resources to provide educators with tools to help all students become savvy searchers and independent learners.

Content curation is a great way to find, organize and share useful knowledge efficiently. There are many free digital tools available to help manage web content in flexible ways allowing us to quickly share resources that are accessible online. Use of curation tools is social and will connect us to the ideas of others and help build our professional learning networks.

Last week I learned that the folks at ThingLink and MentorMob had done some work together to integrate their tools, making it possible to embed a MentorMob playlist directly into a graphic. After experimenting a bit I decided to remix some of the content I've been using for years to teach digital citizenship and the result is the creation of Avatar Adventure .

With so many free and user friendly tech tools available for teachers, it's hard to know where to begin to put together a list of the best tools for teaching and learning so I decided to take a look at my own resources to determine which tools I use the most.

If you can't visit the great wonders of the world in person, Google 's new World Wonders Project can get you pretty close.

I have created a playlist of tools to help students efficiently find information using a variety of digital tools to match unique learning styles. If you would like to use this with your students, click the Share Playlist link at the bottom to grab the embed code or link.

InstaGrok is an intelligent visual search engine and interactive learning tool that collects educational content and displays it in the form of a cloud of related words. The tool is very appealing because it offers a variety of multimedia features to meet the unique learning needs of students.

View this MentorMob playlist to find samples of ways to use Thinglink, a tool for creating interactive multimedia supported graphics.

A wiki is a website that allows members to easily edit and contribute content. Wikispaces is a teacher and student friendly tool that supports multimedia for collaborative learning. A wiki provides teachers with a platform to design learning experiences that provide students with flexible learning paths to meet their unique learning styles Wiki projects can support project based learning.

Content curation is one way to find and share useful knowledge efficiently. There are plenty of user friendly push-button digital tools to help you collect, organize and store web content in flexible ways to allow for shared resources that are accessible online.