"Bans on student use of mobile devices exist for some good reasons-kids use them inappropriately at school and there are safety and security concerns. So why bother considering a change? There are six reasons to consider BYOD"

Chart-Kuhlthau's Information Search Process Model

"Each December, we take a look back at the year's big news with quizzes, teaching ideas and a roundup of links to interesting retrospectives around the Web. And since we're big fans, every year we link to Flocabulary's Year in Rap. Flocabulary is an online learning platform that features educational songs, videos and resources for grades K-12. For the last two years, Flocabulary has created a Year in Rap as a supplement to its popular Week in Rap, which is produced in partnership with Channel One News. This year we thought it would be fun to formally collaborate with them and offer a contest in which students are invited to write lyrics for their own mini "Years in Rap." Since Flocabulary is in the business of using rap for teaching and learning, they were enthusiastic - and even offered to provide a lesson plan to guide teachers or students new to composing in rhyme. Below, you'll find the contest rules, the lesson plan and a rubric to show what we'll be looking for in the lyrics your students post. The contest deadline is Jan. 6."

"The Trumbull writer earned lots of praise and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for his 2009 novel, "The Postcard" -- a warm and nostalgic mystery powered by old postcards -- but his latest book, "Lunch-Box Dream" (Frances Foster Books/Farrar Straus Giroux, $16.99), is a semi-autobiographical story about race relations in 1959."

various stats about driving, accidents

"Stanford University is offering the iOS 5 edition of its well-regarded iPhone and iPad application development course free on iTunes U. "

"Wolfram|Alpha is a free online computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base. Our long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. This can be valuable to educators in many ways. "

Overview or Why? Video prompts

We've heard this story before. The first thing to go in budget cuts is the visual art program or another related art. Proponents of arts education counter with the usual rhetoric on the importance of self-expression and creativity. I, myself, am a product of arts education.

(CNN) -- When Al Charette traveled to the North Pole, he went under it. The USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, made history when it reached the North Pole on August 3, 1958, beneath the ice.

(CNN) -- It has been more than 65 years, but for 93-year-old Anthony Snetro, the image of a Japanese torpedo bomber closing in on him will never go away. Snetro still has vivid memories of the day his life flashed before his eyes.

""We were seven brothers -- seven soldiers," says 91-year old Chikara "Don" Oka, a World War II veteran now living in a retirement home in Los Angeles. "Five of us for the United States and two against us because they were stranded in Japan" when the war came. They're all American citizens born here in the United States."

FunBrain will show you a periodic table that contains the elements' symbols and their periodic numbers.

Test your knowledge of world geography alone or against another online player.

"Welcome to FedFlix, Joint Venture NTIS-1832 between the National Technical Information Service and Public.Resource.Org. Here we feature the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to the U.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors, all of these fine flix are available for reuse without any restrictions whatsoever. "

This tool features a problem-solving activity in which you must transfer blocks of different sizes from one tower to another. The activity is based on a game invented by the French mathematician, Edouard Lucas, in 1883. The rules are that you can only move one block at a time and that a larger block may never lie on top of a smaller one.