AT&T KNE includes information literacy development tools delineated by content areas, subject area, and grade level. For each content area, the site is broken down further to list numerous tools, references, lesson plans, hotlists, information resources, tutorials, activities, and projects. Also, don’t miss KNE’s 21st centuries homepage, Blue Web’n Library, and Wired Learning. Wired Learning is the section devoted to the lessons, games (including the game “Nuts and Bolts of the Big6″ to help students understand the Big6 information literacy model), curriculum, and WebQuests.
KNE’s mission “is to support teachers and librarians achieve meaningful, technology-infused learning environments.” A tool KNE built called Filamentality enables users to tailor some of the technology-infused formats to their own curriculum. This site with its Blue Web’n Library which awards its blue ribbons to the best websites in the content areas deserves a blue ribbon for its own site in its contribution to education and information literacy.
Awesome Library
Evaluation and Development Institute this site “organizes the web” by categorizing recommended and reviewed resources. Useful sections include those dedicated to librarians and teachers (not to mention students, families, and guides to various disciplines). All the resources on the site have been found to be high quality according to the prescribed criteria and the starred resources are considered to be the best of the best.
Center for Media Literacy
The Center for Media Literacy is relevant here because media literacy is closely connected to information literacy in that both types of literacy are centered on enabling the ability to interpret and communicate information effectively (and both purport to be essential to the successful functioning of a democracy). The Center for Media Literacy Website is an excellent resource for understanding that information is communicated via a particular slant. The site contains a choose a Focus page search box and users may explore by Media Issues/Topics or Curriculm/Subject Area.
DMOZ Open Directory Project
The DMOZ Open Directory Project fashions itself to be “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors”. A part of its megalithic database contains the online resources that have been collected related to DMOZ’s information literacy links . If this deep link for the information literacy resources changes, one can always search from the DMOZ main page for information literacy resources.
Educator’s Reference Desk
Educator’s Reference Desk is a site with ERIC resources and tools for both classroom teachers and teacher librarians. The resources section purports to contain thousands of resources all related to educational issues.
Edu-scapes: a site for life-long learners of all ages
Eduscapes designed and maintained by husband and wife team Charles and Annette Lamb (Annette also being the developer of the 8Ws research model) provides a wealth of resources for classroom teachers, library teachers, parents, students, and anyone who is interested in learning in just about anything. The site makes available entire course content of two courses one for teachers entitled Information Inquiry for Teachers and one for librarians entitled School Library Media Specialists that are available to anyone interested in learning more about these professions.
Other notable features include the 42Explore (thematic pathfinders for all content areas), Teacher Tap (resource aimed at aiding teachers in incorporating technology into curriculum), and Activate: the journal of technology rich learning.
The site contains much, much more than has been mentioned. As a site with innovative and reputable resources as well as frequently updated links, it deserves to be a part of every educators’ information literacy landscape.
Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM)
The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) attempts to facilitate dissemination of 21st century skills. The GEM mission is to expand “educators’ capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats”. Toward that honorable end, GEM provides educators with a variety of educational tools such as activities and lessons plans, assessment items, and online projects.
Furthermore, the site is highly reputable for the collections on the site have been provided by members of the GEM consortium that have had their collections “evaluated for authoritativeness, quality, and availability, based on criteria developed and adopted by the GEM Consortium”. GEM is principally sponsored by the National Educators Assocation (NEA) and has plans for future inclusion of expert ratings and teacher comments. GEM is current and currently contains over 50,000 records provided by the over 700 GEM Consortium member collections. Consortium membership is free but requires an application and review process.
Browse resources by subject, type, level, keywords, mediator, beneficiary, or pricecode (not all resources are free but many are). Users may also enter words into the search box to receive results; results may then be narrowed according to the browsable fields. The materials on GEM are material to an understanding of today’s contemporary educational environment.
Global SchoolNet Foundation (GSN)
Global SchoolNet Foundation’s (GSN’s) Internet Projects support worldwide education and collaboration. GSN has a membership program that is free to all persons interested in utilizing the Internet for instructional purposes. GSN’s mission is to harness technological developments “to engage students in meaningful content and personal exchanges with people around the world.”
GSN is structured to facilitate information literacy to create productive citizens in a global economy. GSN is built around the principles of online collaborative learning (OCL) and to this end includes such aspects as an internet projects registry in which users are encouraged to either join an existing project or to commence one of their own, a cyberfair with a focus on authentic learning by having kids conduct their own research and publish their own findings, and online expeditions offering real-time expeditions to remote locations. GSN’s highly collaborative and interactive site is an all-purpose resource for enhancing information literacy skills across the curriculum and across the world.
Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators
Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators is just that—a comprehensive guide to assist educators in their planning, development, and action. Her website is replete with resources related to information literacy. For instance, she makes presentations available for teachers to utilize such as The ABCs of Website Evaulation, Many Face of Technology and Information Literacy, and Planting the Seeds of Change: Infusing Information Literacy Skills, Orchestrating the Research Process: The Library Media Specialist’s Role.
Among other useful features, her site includes lesson plans, a Schrock Guide Award List for the best resources online in the content areas, a custom classroom where its free to register and then create custom quizzes, puzzles, and worksheets, and a curriculum center providing activities for core topics such as the weather and electricity. Kathy Shrock’s website is an accessible and serviceable website designed to facilitate educators’ capacity for teaching and learning; it’s a great guide to include as a part of any educators’ information literacy journey.
Librarians Internet Index
Librarian’s Internet Index is a directory of librarian evaluated websites with a motto “Websites you can trust”. The search box is helpful for attaining access to the recommended sites on information literacy or other issues of interest for teachers and librarians.
NoodleTools
NoodleTools “Smart Tools. Smart Research” is a good site for students to know about because it does indeed provide many tools to facilitate smart researching. NoodleTools also has an informative page defining the different types of 21st century literacies, a page which in itself provides resources for understanding the different competencies and tools for enhancing one’s literacy in the sundry areas listed. Also useful is the Curriculum Collaboration Toolkit which provides answers to frequently asked questions about the collaborative endeavor. NoodleTools is maintained by Debbie Abilock and contains many free tools as well as subscription only resources.
The free tools are resources supporting understanding of the research process and are suitable for use by teachers, librarians, and students alike. Also on Abilock’s site, she has elaborated upon her own process model of information literacy entitled the Building Blocks of Research which includes eight steps.
The Question Mark
The Question Mark is “an educational journal devoted to questions, questioning, sound intelligence, strategic reading and quality teaching”. On this site, Jamie McKenzie (author of and information literacy process model and multiple books related to technology, questioning, teaching, and learning) provides educators with myriad resources to aid them in building better questions, modeling building better questions for students, and teaching students to build better qeustions for themselves. The current issue as well as past issues are available not to mention additional recommended articles and sample lesson plans. The site also includes a Module Maker. The intent of the Module Maker is to enable teachers to create their own question-stimulating online research modules. The excellence of this site related to questioning leads me to ponder, why wouldn’t you want to visit this site?
S.O.S. for Information Literacy
S.O.S. for Information Literacy provides a interactive resource for educators to utilize in planning lessons as well as to share with their students. Through its diverse content, it facilitates learning in multiple intelligences. The SOS website is a collaborative effort by many teacher librarians to create a multimedia database of lesson plans and teaching tools on information literacy.
The site began as a project of the American Association of School Librarians’ (AASL) conference. The database has flexible searching for information literacy rich lesson plans by keyword, grade level, subject area, or author. Users of this site must register in order to participate and are welcome to add their own submissions to the database. While registration is free, the lesson plan ideas available are resource rich.
Springfield Township High School Virtual Library
Springfield Township High School’s Virtual Library is a motivational site to evince the potential of collaborative relationships and thriving school libraries. The virtual library has the advantage of being open to students and teachers 24 hours a day. It contains myriad laudable elements including links for students, links for teachers, pathfinders, online lessons and activities, pathfinders, databases, reference desk, librarian stuff, and more.
The online activities promoting information literacy each include a learning/standard objective, title of activity/resource, and description. This site is inspirational in its capacity to enhance student information literacy through a virtual library that complements and supports the school’s physical library. This site is well worth a visit for other school librarians and teachers who should pay close observation to its structure and consider using it as a baseline model to build similarly information-rich homepages for their own schools. The site is maintained by the school’s library and information literacy guru Joyce Valenza.
SUNLINK
SUNLINK is a site maintained by College of Education at the University of Central Florida and as such is heavily tailored to Florida educators. Still, the site includes sections for teachers and for media specialists that contain a valuable collection of links to resources as well as including daily lesson plan ideas. Brought to you from the sunshine state, it’s a decent site to use to surf for ideas; it’s well maintained and diverse in construction.
Need help navigating? Return to How to use this site.
