We believe search skills are essential to 21st century education. Teachers and students need to develop the ability to effectively mine for information using search engines, search strategies, and search tools such as yolink. Additionally, the ability to critically evaluate search information is essential.

We encourage schools and universities to help their students and faculty develop 21st century search skills. To support this process, we’ve assembled resources from yolink, Creative Commons, and Google. All materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. You’re welcome to share and non-commercially distribute this content as you give attribution to the original sources.

We believe knowledge should be shared openly and that’s why we support efforts of organizations such as Creative Commons. Creative Commons (“CC”) is a non-profit organization “dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with therules of copyright.” CC provides alternative licenses to content to encourage collaboration and improvement of intellectual property.

Students and teachers need to be especially aware of copyright laws as they search for, remix, and publish digital content. Today’s students not only consume content, they create new content.  Applying Creative Commons’ licenses allow for greater flexibility in how primary source materials are used in classrooms and beyond. We believe students should be explicitly taught 21st century search skills and how to utilize these skills in their schoolwork on a consistent basis.

In its efforts to promote search literacy education, Creative Commons recently published a new search literacy curriculum for high school students. The curriculum is a compilation of the work of many, including Google search expert Dan Russell. We’re distributing a copy of this curriculum, as well as Dan’s teaching materials, on USB drives we’re giving to educators at ISTE 2010. We hope educators will utilize these resources in their classrooms and in professional development sessions. 

For additional information, please explore our web site http://www.yolinkeducation.com. We also provide training on how to use the yolink search technology to foster search literacy. For more details and to consult with a yolink evangelist, please send an email to info@yolink.com.

Thank you and we hope you enjoy the conference! Stop by booth #2419 to say hello and to get a free USB drive containing yolink education materials and Creative Common's new search literacy curriculum.

The yolink Education Team

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