The findingDulcinea Blog

A Search Engine for Educators

Three years ago, we introduced SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It is a bold concept – a human curated search engine that searches only Web sites that have been evaluated by research experts. We didn’t apply an algorithm or a filter – we created a whitelist of 35,000 Websites. Reviewers have uniformly praised SweetSearch as an outstanding tool for students.

After we launched, we learned of another group of people that may actually appreciate SweetSearch even more – educators. We continually monitor Twitter and education list serves to learn about the specific search needs of educators, and to make sure we meet those needs. The response has been gratifying:

 

See many more Tweets by educators about SweetSearch.

Teachers are learning that if they search in our reliable universe of sites, they can quickly build their lesson plans, find blogs and advice from fellow educators, and discover primary resources, which are hard to locate using the internal search function of sites such as The Library of Congress or National Archives.

To see typical results for yourself, take a look at the results for these representative terms, then compare them to the results of Google and Bing:

Holocaust

Differentiated Instruction

War of 1812

Shakespeare Sonnets

World War II

 You'll likely find, as Paul Gilster, a technology journalist, wrote in the News Observer about SweetSearch: “Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality....I was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials.”

SweetSearch has integrated Yolink, a tool that highlights keywords, showing where the term is used and in what context, so that anyone can quickly scan a search results page and easily determine which results will be most helpful for a particular task. See how quickly you can evaluate the full first page of 20 results! The search terms and surrounding context can then be saved, with one click, to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib's citation generator, or a social bookmarking service. So you not only can find what you’re looking for in seconds, but you can be sharing it with colleagues moments later.

For Open Education Resource platforms to succeed, they need to be as easy for educators to use as possible. It's not enough to give educators a long, aggregated list of relevant resources of varying quality; the resources need to be expertly curated, and there must be a function for educators to search within these resources.

That is what SweetSearch provides, at no cost.

 

  

 

 

Mark Moran

CEO

Today is National Grammar Day (and Twitter is No Excuse!)

Get this picture on a t-shirt at Allfavourites.com.

You can fire off a three-paragraph e-mail in one minute and condense a day’s worth of thoughts into a few 140-character tweets.

But how’s your grammar?

Modes of communication like e-mail, instant messaging, texting and Twitter are changing a lot of things, like the way we get information, how we consume it and most importantly on National Grammar Day, how we compose it.

Today is a chance to treat every utterance like it can’t be spell-checked by Microsoft Word.

 The official site of National Grammar Day has a simple message for all those who want to “get involved” in the celebration: “Speak well! Write well! And on March 4, march forth and spread the word. We want people to think about language and how it can be used best.”

One way you can “march forth” is by challenging yourself with the University of California Press’s copy editing quiz. You may feel like you’re back in the classroom where you first took the SAT. But even if you get the answers wrong, you’ll get an explanation of the right answers.

Also, read our article on the decline of grammar, in "What's Happening to Writing Skills?"

Grammar Girl hosts podcasts about common grammar and usage mistakes. Confused about “which” and “that”? “Between” vs. “among”? Need proofreading tips? These and more topics are covered in a format that’ll give you a nice break from screen-based reading.

Refer back to a good, old-fashioned book, “The Elements of Style,” for trustworthy tips and explanations.

Finally, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar publishes this blog in which it members "document their noble efforts."

Check out our Web Guides to Elementary School English and Middle School English for links to some quality sites and tips on English that you can impart to the young people you know.

Liz Colville

What Will Take the Place of Textbooks in the Social Studies Curriculum?

For many years, educators and other observers have forecast the death of the textbook.

Yet when Apple introduced iBooks two weeks ago, it was met with great fanfare in parts of the education community.  Several major textbook publishers signed on as initial customers.

It’s no surprise that these companies eagerly signed on to a “solution” that largely preserves the status quo. The iBooks, for all their bells and whistles, still have one fatal flaw: they are still textbooks. They are a case, in the words of Pete Townsend, of “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”

As education professor Alec Couros Tweeted last week, “as long as there are textbooks of any sort, there will be no reform.”

What will it take to bring about the death of the textbook?

What comes next must be created by passionate educators who, in the words of John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter (Iowa) Schools, collectively decide that no one should have "ownership" over what is taught in schools.

iBooks fall far short of this ideal:

• iBooks are created by education companies that are susceptible to politically driven agendas. This is a phenomenon that has been around long before the 2010 Texas controversy.

• iBooks reflect the perspective of a small number of writers and editors, rather than the collective wisdom of experienced educators.
• Like  conventional textbooks, iBooks are geared towards requiring students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, rather than encouraging them to explore the full range of a topic on their own, think for themselves, and form their own perspectives.

• iBooks largely impose a textbook's "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs;

• iBooks will not reduce the $8 to $15 billion the U.S. education system spends on text books each year.  iPads are required to read them, and, given the large file size for each textbook, students will likely need the 32GB iPad, which currently retails for $699; furthermore, the $15 textbook is not transferable from one student to another, and thus the cost is the same as a $75 textbook that lasts five years.

How can educators collaboratively develop a tool that solves all of these problems?

For many years now, a rapidly growing number of innovative educators around the world have been using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. They are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. This information is the virtual version of a "course pack" of articles that many college professors curate for students.

What is needed is a single, central repository that aggregates the work of these educators and makes it easily searchable. Teachers would be able to access assignments created by other teachers, learn from them, build on them, and then contribute their own, improved versions to the repository. 

To put a smiley face on a despised term, it would create a "Race to the Top" unburdened by federal oversight.

We’ve created a prototype of such a repository, called findingEducation (a name unlikely to endure). It's in Alpha stage, but in its current form, it has several useful features:

• Its back-end helps includes selective tools that help educators easily find the best online resources about any subject.
• Its “My Library” enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, which can be viewed by other educators;
•  Educators than share the links with students on a blog-like assignment page, called a “digital classroom.”
• Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website.
• For findingEducation, or any other tool, to replace textbooks, it needs a critical mass of educators from one subject using it regularly. Educators must be permitted to make use of each other’s work, without restriction.

For example, once a few dozen U.S. History teachers create innovative, resource-rich assignments relating to the U.S Civil War, a new teacher entering the fray can synthesize the best of the existing lesson plans to create his or her own.

See a sample page: http://markskillman.findingeducation.com/

For more information on findingEducation:

Take a site tour.

See our help section for our FAQ and other tips for using findingEducation.

How Dulcinea Media Helps School Librarians Serve Teachers & Students

At Dulcinea Media, we view school librarians as our best allies in helping us fulfill our mission to help students learn how to use the web effectively.

We've attended the past two AASL shows and many local library conferences, and we've spent plenty of time visiting schools and monitoring LM_Net to learn how we can help librarians help teachers and students. We've also become one of the most ardent advocates for school librarians in the face of clueless school boards that want to cut their positions.

Click here to read reviews of our work. Perhaps the kindest words in the many reviews of our products come from Temple University Professor Renee Hobbs, who wrote to us, "your website is such a treasure trove of fascinating stuff! I want every educator in America to know about it."

We agree with that aim! To that end, here is a brief discussion of our products and how they help school librarians serve:

1. In April 2012, we'll be releasing our Web Research Tutorial; it is the only product for which we will charge a fee, and a modest one at that. Based on research studies and the result of extensive interviews, it will teach web research skills to educators and students in a way that no other product does. Using a multimedia, varied format, it meets them where they are and uses pragmatic analogies and examples to bring them along to where they need to be.

2. SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students, is a free tool that helps educators and students find credible, comprehensive resources about their subject, quickly (BONUS: librarians and teachers tell us it helps them find awesome resources as well!  We use it to respond to librarian queries on LM_Net and often find the requested info in seconds). SweetSearch searches only 35,000 websites that research experts have approved, and it does not contain offensive ads! We've also introduced SweetSearch4Me, the only search engine that prominently features on the first results page the high quality Web sites created for elementary school students. READ MORE.

We offer a widget for both SweetSearch and SweetSearch4Me, so you can embed them on your school Web sites. But the best way to get your students to use these superior tools is to add them on to every browser in your school; to do this for Firefox and Internet Explorer, just click the green Add-On box on the top right of SweetSearch.

3. Do your students write about the same events and people, year after year? SweetSearch Biographies is an indexed collection of more than 1,000 biographies, sortable by profession, gender, and race/origin. Students using this will soon be teaching you about people you've never heard of.

4. Access our landing page for Social Studies  In the left column, you'll find dozen of Web Guides that are comprehensive, narrated tours of the best content on the Web about the subject, that directly link to the best primary sources about a subject. We have hundreds of other web guides as well. For librarians, we offer Sweet Sites, a distilled version of our education Web Guides, divided into teacher and student pages for high school, middle school and elementary school. Feel free to link to these pages, or even copy the links you like onto your own library Web site.

The social studies page includes our seminal article, "101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class," that points teachers and students to a trove of great sites, organized by topic. You'll also find on this page links to articles that curate the best online resources, such as "Sites for Learning About Countries," "Sites for Learning About the 50 States," "9 Sites to find Interesting Interviews," and our Innovations series.

5. Our  On This Day articles explain an historical event, what led up to it, what happened that day, and the long-term recriminations and echoes in history. We also publish it in Spanish, as Hoy en la Historia. We've recently partnered with The New York Times to combine our respective On This Day products into "Historic Headlines," which relates historic events to today's world.

6. The many presentations we create each year are posted on Slideshare. The presentations explain, among other things, why so many websites restrict users under 13 and what you can do about it, and how to understand CIPA to fight overly restrictive Internet filters.

7. We've written thousands of headline articles in our "Beyond the Headlines" Section; Joyce Valenza wrote on her School Library Journal blog that our "discoveries are  timely and seem to continually attack those topics my students research." We find additional background or reference information on the topic, related topics and opposing points of view. We integrate all this information into a cohesive, comprehensive look at the topic, and link to our sources, which we align in a single box.

A white paper released in November 2010 by Temple University Media Education Professor Renee Hobbs, sponsored by The Knight Commission, included Beyond the Headlines in its "Portraits of Success: Powerful Voices for Kids" and wrote, "Finding Dulcinea... addresses the 'context deficit' that occurs with online searching."

Some examples of where we addressed the context deficit in a headline story:

• after the death of Osama Bin Laden, social media was clogged with the rampant use of poorly cited or fake quotes online. Many noted the problem, but none suggested ways to address it. Thus we wrote "Misquotes: Searching for Authenticity Online," which teaches students how to verify quotes.
• Because we know schools struggle with how students can use Wikipedia effectively, we wrote, "The Top 10 Reasons Students Can't Cite Wikipedia."
• When Iran violently suppressed protests last year, we provided context by writing about the History of Iranian Revolutions.
• When a killer whale tragically drowned a Sea World trainer, leading to calls for its release into the wild, our article about it summarized and linked to a PBS documentary that provided a chart discussing all 133 killer whales that had ever been captured in the wild for use in shows.

8. We know your hectic schedule doesn't have always a slot that says "visit findingDulcinea." So we come to you! Our free e-mail newsletter arrives at your inbox with an overview of On This Day and our Happy Birthday biography feature, as well as links to our best education articles.

Ask your students to become a fan of findingDulcinea on Facebook, and we'll occasionally interrupt their "urgent" status updates with some inspiring and educational content.

Please also follow us on Twitter  @findingDulcinea

Help us help you. Please send me feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. on our content and tools, to Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com.

We’d love to hear from you!

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

findingDulcinea and LineTime Partner on History Timeline App

We're thrilled to announce a new collaboration with LineTime, a German group that develops mobile apps.

LineTime 1.o was introduced through the Apple App Store in January 2011. It received rave reviews, including a "Pick of the Week" nod from Apple Germany, and the top award at Appbackrthon Berlin, an iOS Hackathon.

LineTime 1.0 offered users the ability to view the course of modern history on a timeline, and to drill down into each century, decade or year. It was populated with history content from Wikipedia, and was intended as a demonstration of the app's potential when populated with additional content, or used in conjunction with other apps.

We immediately saw the tremendous potential for this app in education. It literally changes the way students look at history, enabling them to view historical events in full context, in a way that textbooks never could.  Most history courses are narrow in scope, and review a limited set of events that fit the theme of the course. Thus, students of United States History often study the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and then World War II, while barely taking note of the troubles of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the rise of fascism in Italy, the Spanish Civil War, or the start of the second Sino-Japanese War. With the right content, the LineTime App has the potential to enable students to see what was happening all over the world in a particular decade, year, month or day.

The app's search function also enables students to trace history through a single word. Search on "earthquakes," "assassination" or "treaty" and you'll find a list of every entry in the app that contains those words. Students can then tab through these entries and see history through yet another lens.

We promptly began collaborating with LineTime on a partnership to add findingDulcinea's On This Day content to the app. Our On This Day content is comprised of more than 400 well-researched articles about important historic events, providing full context about the event and links to the best online resources about it. It's the basis of our Historic Headlines collaboration with The New York Times, and we're thrilled to introduce this additional way for students and history buffs to interact with our content.

LineTime 1.5 is now available in the App Store for the introductory price of $2.99 (with bulk discounts for schools). We plan to move quickly to offer updated versions with substantially more content. While these future versions will surely be priced higher than this introductory price, anyone purchasing LineTime 1.5 will receive all future updates at no charge. Watch this video to see LineTime 1.5 in action!

We're also contemplating additional apps that will complement LineTime 1.5, for a modest additional charge. Some may focus intently on a particular time period or event; for instance, we may offer a separate app with hundreds or even thousands of entries about the U.S. Civil Rights movement, or another with minute-by-minute details of the assassination of JFK. We are also contemplating another app that would enable users to customize LineTime with their own custom entries, whether about their ancestors, their country or their local area.

As always, we highly value the feedback of educators, who have essentially written our product roadmap the past three years. Please write me at Mark[dot]Moran[at]DulcineaMedia[dotcom] with suggestions for how we can make the LineTime App an even better learning tool.

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial

Dulcinea Media Announces Tutorial for Teaching Web Research Skills

June 22, 2011 – New York, NY – Each year, schools in the United States spend literally billions of dollars on Internet access to the more than 15 million computers in schools, nearly 100% of which are now online.  Unfortunately, much of this money is wasted, because not enough time is invested in teaching students and educators how to use the Web to research effectively - a critical skill for 21st century workers.

Study after study conducted over the past decade has shown that most students cannot effectively find information online, evaluate it, and put it to use. Furthermore, recent studies show that many educators, who are overburdened by ever-growing paperwork and standardized testing, have, like most adults, not fully developed their own web research skills. Researchers now warn of a new digital divide, between students who do receive effective web research training and those who do not.

To help educators counter this new digital divide, Dulcinea Media, Inc. today announced the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial, a research-based, multimedia tutorial that teaches effective web research skills to both educators and students.

Please view our video explaining the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial.

Alternatively, view our SlideShare presentation, without the voiceover.

Lastly, click here to preview the educator version of the tutorial.

The company plans to release several versions of the Tutorial:

• For K-12 educators, titled “Web Research Skills for Educators;”
• for students in Grades K-6, titled “How to Be a Rock Star Researcher;”
• for students in Grades 7-12 and college, titled “Stop Searching, Start Finding: Get Better Results in Half the Time;” and
• versions of the above titles for Spanish-speakers 

The planned full release schedule is as follows:

• the educator version will be available in early December 2011;
• the version for older students will be released in early December 2011;
• the version for younger students and the Spanish language version will be released in January 2012.

The Company will also release additional information about the Web Research Tutorial, in accordance with the above schedule, through its blog.

Composition of Tutorial: 

The SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial is published as an electronic video book, with 16 chapters. Each chapter offers an introduction, a 3 to 5-minute video, a print guide to the topic, links to expertly curated third-party resources, and a self-quiz to help the viewer evaluate retention of the core concepts in the chapter. Each chapter builds upon, and reinforces concepts taught in the previous chapter. The company is also creating posters, glossaries and other visual elements to aid learning.

Chapter titles include:

• Planning and Adjusting Your Research;
• Using Special Search Functions;
• Finding and Using Primary Sources;
• Why Did the Author Write This;
•  Thinking Critically; and
• Synthesizing Your Sources

The content engages the reader and respect the way people learn best today. Unlike many professional  development systems that involve a lengthy, one-time presentation with little follow-up, Dulcinea Media’s tutorial offers a self-directed program of video tutorials, with several types of supporting materials and frequent follow-ups.

Dulcinea Media will update the Tutorial twice a year to incorporate new developments in web research and to leverage new learning tools.

Summary of Research Basis for Tutorial:

A 2006 report by the Educational Testing Service found, “students can use technology for socializing or entertainment but still have problems finding information, evaluating it and then putting it to use.”[1] Authors of a 2010 Northwestern study of college students reported that “students’ level of faith in their search engine of choice is so high that they do not feel the need to verify for themselves who authored the pages they view or what their qualifications might be.” [2]

Many other studies have similarly concluded that students do not know how to search the Web effectively, and struggle to synthesize multiple resources. Furthermore, no consensus has emerged on how to teach students Web research skills. [3]

The Web Research Tutorial is based on: (i) a thorough analysis of research studies of the habits of both skilled and inexperienced web users [4]; (ii) input from leading educators; and (iii) the research habits of the staff members of findingDulcinea, who have collectively written thousands of articles that effectively synthesize the best online resources about a topic.

Pricing: 

The annual license cost per school for the Web Research Tutorial, based on total student population:

 

Student pop.	Annual Pricing
1-249	$719
250-499	$919
500-749	$1099
750-999	$1269
1,000+	$1399

 

All versions will be made available to all scholls purchasing the tutorial.

Pricing does not include the option for an in-person or virtual presentation by a Dulcinea Media staff member or consultant, for which an additional fee, and reasonable travel expenses will apply.

The license term is for one year and may be renewed annually.

Schools may acquire a permanent license with a one-time payment equal to 4x the annual fee.

Dulcinea Media will update the Tutorial twice a year to incorporate new developments in web research and to leverage new learning tools.

“Early Adopter” Incentive:

As an early ordering incentive, schools that pay for the tutorial within 30 days of its full release will receive a 50% discount, for the initial one-year term and up to two renewal terms.

Schools that order and pay for the tutorial between 31 and 60 days following its full release will be offered at a 25% discount for the initial one-year term and up to two renewal terms.

Standards Alignment:

The SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial aligns to the Core Common State Standards for English and Language Arts. In particular, it addresses the standards relating to:

• conducting research projects based on focused questions;
• tailoring searches online to acquire useful information efficiently;
• gathering relevant information from multiple print and digital sources;
• assessing the credibility and accuracy of each source; and
• integrating the information while avoiding plagiarism. 

The Tutorial also aligns to standards set by ISTE, the ALA, and NCTE/IRA.

Delivery of Tutorial:

The e-book will be web-based, accessed through password protected accounts. In coming months, it will also be made available as an app on the iPad, iPhone and Android phones.

Ordering Information:

Please email info@DulcineaMedia.com or call (917) 597-3815 to discuss ordering the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial.

_______________________________

[1] Paul D. Thacker, “Are College Students Techno Idiots?” Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2006 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/15/infolit

[2] Debra Viadero, “Collecting Evidence,” EdWeek, March 29, 2007 http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/03/29/30tcresearch.h26.html

[3] Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Kristin Yates Thomas, Northwestern University, “Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content,” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010), 468–494 1932–8036/20100468 http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636

[4] Anne Aula, Rehan Khan and Zhiwei Guan, “How does Search Behavior Change as Search Becomes More Difficult?” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010 http://dub.washington.edu/pubs/215

 

A Study of Students Online Research Behavior

In January 2010, Dulcinea Media created a survey to assess the online research skills of middle school and high school students in New York State.  With the help of several school librarians and classroom teachers, we surveyed 300 students at nine schools about their research habits.  After analyzing our results, we published our report on the findings and implications of our study.  Download StudyStudentsOnlineResearch

 The majority of students in our study have access to computers at school and at home.  Three-quarters of those surveyed self-describe as “excellent” or “very good” at search.  Nevertheless, most middle school and high school students cannot adequately explain their search strategies, or how they evaluate a website’s credibility.

 At the middle school level, when querying a search engine, more than half of these students use “natural language” instead of keywords.  It appears likely that many simply copy the question or problem assigned by their teachers into a search engine’s search box.  When initial search results are unavailing, both middle school and high school students simply “keep trying” or “re-word” their queries, but they cannot adequately explain their methods for doing so.

 When they do locate a source they deem useful, roughly one-third of middle school students report choosing it because it “looked good,” “sounded good,” or has “the correct information.”  One middle school student’s approach to assessing information boiled down to, “if it’s what my teacher told me to find.”  In other words, once students find “the answer” they seek, they spend little effort considering the credibility of a resource.

 When we asked students how often they evaluate the author of a document or website, or the date it was published, the majority of respondents answered “rarely or never.”  In the comment box, one student notes, “It doesn’t really matter who the writer is.”  As for the date an article was published, another student writes, “I can’t find it.”

Our survey suggests that students’ Internet research skills are far from adequate. All students must learn how to construct a query and evaluate the results, how search engines function and how to develop consistent habits or workarounds in response to poor result listings. Acquiring sound search strategies as well as critical evaluations skills while they are still in school will better prepare these students for college and their future careers.

In Summer 2011, Dulcinea Media will introduce the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial, a comprehensive, multimedia approach to teaching students, and educators, how to use the Web to conduct research effectively.

Examples of Innovative Teaching Practices

 Since September 2006, we've been curating content and creating innovative tools to help educators integrate the Internet into their curriculum, and teach students how to use the Internet effectively.

A barrier to the wide adoption of our products is the status quo - textbooks and other crude tools from the 19th century that remain the primary method by which students learn. We've attended dozens of education conferences in the past two years, and have met thousands of passionate educators who are determined to bring about their own version of education reform - one that is focused on students. The goal of these efforts is to create a new system of education that is relevant to and engages students, addresses them as individuals, lets them develop their passions, and encourages the development of skills they'll need to succeed when they graduate, not the skills their parents needed when they graduated 30 years ago.

With the explosive growth in social media, it has become easier to interact with these educators on a daily basis, rather than at once-a-month conferences. The number of solid examples of innovative teaching practices we're seeing is growing exponentially. Here, we'll share just a few that we've come across recently.

In a blog post aptly titled, "Own It," Andy Marcinek writes of how he assigned his English 101: College Composition course what he termed, "not a standard, written essay, but a focused collection of media that they will use to inform, to persuade, to challenge or defend." He gave them a simple writing prompt, and then had them gather links, images, videos, and other media to synthesize, with his guidance, into a final presentation. Andy explains, "I am making an attempt to harness all the great resources we have available at the moment. I feel it is my moral obligation as a teacher to open up all learning avenues to them, not hide them." He then provides a new prompt, this one for his fellow educators: his work is "not the pinnacle of classroom innovation. It is a start. It is an idea that I hope you steal, remix and make your own, for your own students. Don’t we owe them that?"

One educator who feels Marcinek's sense of obligation to students is Lisa Neilsen, Technology Innovation Manager in NYC's public schools. In "Advice for Choosing Pages, Groups or Profiles When Using Facebook for Education," Neilsen gives advice and specific examples of educators who are using Facebook to teach, collaborate with students, and communicate with students, parents and others in the community. Nielsen writes that, "in schools where we’re doing what is right for kids, you see engaged youth who use the filter between their ears to determine how to best access information. Students are empowered rather than restricted from using personally owned digital devices in school.  At these schools they understand that people, not tools, have behavior.  Fortunately, more and more often these schools that mirror the real world are starting to crop up." 

One of the exemplars that Neilsen cites is Michelle Luhtala, whose library program at New Canaan High won the ALA's 2010 National School Library Media Program of the Year. Luhtala maintains separate personal and professional profiles on Facebook, as well as a Page for her library. In response to Nielsen's post, Luthala explains how friending students through her professional profile enabled her to, among other things, (i) get student input for the post, at 10 pm on a Friday night, (ii) collaborate with two groups of students who decided to enter a video contest at the last minute, and (iii) coordinate a trip by a large group of students to Philadelphia, for a Model UN.

Another teacher who is a living example of effective and innovative practices  is Pulaski (WI) High School English teacher Kim Noe, recent winner of the "Golden Apple Award" from the Green Bay (WI) Chamber of Commerce. According to the Green Bay Press Gazete, Noe's philosophy when it comes to technology is that students, “don’t turn it off very often, so why not tap into it?" The Gazette reports that, in Noe's classes, "tasks like memorizing vocabulary words are accompanied by related YouTube videos," students receive MP3 files with feedback to essays, and authors visit via Skype. Further, Noe chats with students every night on Facebook; she says, “I have found Facebook is one of the greatest tools to reach kids I could imagine.” How do the students react to Noe's practices? Her co-principal, Dan Slowey, tells the Gazette, “it becomes kind of a small, close-knit family in those classrooms.”

The last "practices" I want to note were not actually put into place by a classroom teacher; they were suggested by Ashley Appozardi, a student teacher who is observing classes. She sat in on the class of a teacher reviewing fractions, in the wake of a test where students had not performed well. In Azzopardi's view, the teacher:

"- Moved through the questions very quickly

- Did not give the students enough time to answer her questions

- Did not rub off the writing on the whiteboard once moved onto the next question

- Did not provide much praise to the students

- Did not allow the students to write anything in their books

- Did not allow the students to use concrete materials, and

- Did not use the interactive whiteboard."

Azzopardi believes that the students learned little from the lesson.

She echoes the calls from Marcinek and Nielsen to build upon the innovative work of other educators, as she writes, "we need to acknowledge that our students have changed radically. The educational system wasn’t designed to teach today’s students....Adapting materials to the language of this generation has already been done successfully, in particular the creation of games which help teach the content, even the most serious....I can only imagine how different that lesson could have been if the interactive whiteboard had been turned on. Instead of the students looking out the window, hoping not to be the one chosen to answer a confusing question next, they could have been excited, engaged, learning and participating in a visual and interactive math lesson."

These four educators are a very small sample of the passionate educators from all over the world who are beginning to offer up examples of innovative, and effective, teaching practices for educators to follow.

Mark E. Moran
CEO

 

In the comments, please offers your own examples that you invite others to "steal, remix and make [their] own."

Want to Empower Students? Expect More of Them

What can happen when educators and parents set high expectations for students?

What follows is a discussion primarily of what happens when adults raise expectations of students facing profound physical, mental, emotional or societal challenges,. However, it imparts lessons germane to the education of all students, regardless of their situation.

One of the most celebrated stories in U.S. schools is “The Miracle Worker,” about teacher Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller, an unruly deaf and blind child that Sullivan tutored. Sullivan raised expectations for Helen, by refusing to let Helen continue eating with her fingers and from other people’s plates. In the film about their true story, this leads to a heart-wrenching physical battle that leaves them both crying on the floor.

A little later, Sullivan and Keller reached a breakthrough moment as the teacher spelled a word into the child’s palm. As Helen wrote in her autobiography years later, 

“I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

Keller graduated with honors from Radcliffe College and became a renowned writer and public speaker, because a teacher goaded her to recast her physical challenges not as an excuse for poor table manners, but as “barriers that could be swept away.”

Sullivan’s victory over her own profound challenges may be what led her to form such high expectations for Helen.  Sullivan was blind as a child until surgery gave her sight, and was abandoned by an alcoholic father after her mother died. She grew up in a poorhouse, but somehow persuaded the manager to send her to school. The perseverance she showed forever changed her life, and that of her famous student.

Maya Angelou  faced her own barriers as a child. As a result of traumatic incidents, Angelou refused to speak from ages seven to 12. She found solace in poetry, and memorized the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare and others.

Angelou describes how a teacher, Mrs. Flowers, convinced her to speak: “She said, ‘You don’t love poetry.’ And it was the cruelest thing I think she could have done. Because she seemed to be taking my only friend. She said, ‘You can’t love poetry. In order to love poetry, you must speak it. You must feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.’ … She was trying to shock me. And one day I went under the house … and I tried poetry. And I had a voice. I had a voice.”

For Helen Keller and Maya Angelou, Anne Sullivan and Mrs. Flowers each were the “one person” that Aimee Mullins says every child needs.

Mullins is an athlete, model, actress, and motivational speaker, who had her legs amputated below the knee shortly after birth.  In a TED Talk titled "The Opportunity of Adversity," Mullins spoke the hideous synonyms she found in a thesaurus for the word “disabled.” What upset her, she said, weren’t the words themselves, but rather “the values behind the words and how we construct those values.”

 

For a child to overcome the low expectations set by labels or value constructs, Mullins said,

“all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power and you’re off. If you  can hand somebody the key to [her] own power, the human spirit is so receptive, if you…open a door for [people] at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You are teaching them to open doors for themselves."

If empowering students to reach their true potential is the root of education, how do educators achieve it?

Angela Maiers, a former teacher turned educational consultant, focuses on the power of words. In a post titled, “The Power of Words – Examining Teacher Talk,” she writes that, “if we choose our words wisely, our language can help students envision success, stretch their thinking, [and] advance independent behaviors and actions."

Steven R. Schrader, a language teacher in Japan, defines empowerment as “helping learners become aware that they can have an impact on their environment, and can exert some control over their circumstances.” Schrader writes that, when we use language to remind young people, especially those marginalized by society, of their potential, we give control over their circumstances back to them.

Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman has spoken about the powerful effect when students do envison success, exert control over their circumstances, and see the epiphany of their own power.

In a July 2009 interview with Harvard University’s Charles Ogletree at the Aspen Institute, she argued that the present state of minority education in the U.S. may be worse than in the days of segregation, asserting that back then,

“We had teachers who had very high expectations....We were going to learn our tables, we were going to learn how to read. And we had this community buffer, because while the external world told us we weren’t important and couldn’t succeed, our parents said it wasn’t so … our teachers said it wasn’t so, our preacher said it wasn’t so, and so we knew it wasn’t so. … And we always were taught that we could change the world, and we had these role models everywhere. That’s missing today for so many of our children.”

Are you the "one person" students need to learn to open doors for themselves?

Are you helping students envision success, advance independent behaviors, and exert control over their circumstances?

Mark E. Moran

 

21st Century Activities for Women's History Month

This week, I scoured the Web for lesson plans and activities for Women's History Month. Few, if any, asked students to do Web research, demonstrate media literacy, synthesize multiple resources, communicate their findings in a manner that engages modern audiences, or share their project outside the walls of their school.

Below I suggest a few activities that will help students learn about inspiring women and seminal events in women's history, and also offer a learning experience that is relevant to the world in which they live and will one day seek to work. At the end of the post, we list our free resources to assist students in their work, and discuss an opportunity for students to publish their work.

Create a Timeline on Life.com

Life.com offers an extensive collection of photos from Life Magazine's legendary archives, as well as from Getty Images. It enables users to create and share a timeline of photos they select, and to write a caption for each photo. Here are four sample timelines about women in history. Caution: some of the photos on Life.com have adult themes, or may depict gore or violence.

Research Women's Firsts in 2010

History is not only what happened long ago; it is made every day. Two years ago, we partnered with The Women on the Web on "2008 Firsts for Women," a collection of women from all over the world who became the first of their gender to achieve something significant in 2008. One example was Brittany Cantazaro, who at the age of 19, had become New York Waterway’s first female ferry captain. Only a week after we published her profile, Brittany piloted the first ferry to rescue passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 after Captain Sullenberger landed it in the Hudson River. She exhibited wisdom beyond her years by cutting the engines of the ferry to avoid creating a wake that could have sent the plane's passengers plunging into the chilly water.

Have a team of students research and create "2010 Firsts for Women." In learning about women who are breaking barriers today, students will ponder why this is so, and gain a greater appreciation for those woman who broke barriers so many years ago.

A research tip: databases, which allow for more precise date targeting than any search engine, will be indispensible for identifying 2010's firsts for women.

Write a Series of Articles with a Common Theme, or Add to One of Ours

We've created a number of series of articles about women around a common theme:

• When we learned about Ada Lovelace, who created one of the world's first computer programs, we created a series of 6 Unsung Women who never got fair credit for their brilliant ideas, heroic deeds or extraordinary work, often due to prejudice, discrimination or the social mores of their time.
• Women who found their calling later in life often have the most unexpectedly inspiring stories. Last year, we again teamed with The Women on the Web to profile Late Bloomers, a handful of women who came into their own later in life, demonstrating the power of perseverance and the value of experience.
• In Women Who Dared, we recognized 15 women whose actions—in courtrooms, on buses, in polling booths and in planes—shattered the status quo. Through guts, grit and unyielding perseverance these women made a difference, raising our expectations for ourselves, our daughters, and our granddaughters.
• In Women of Honor: Writers Who Won’t Be Silenced, we honored five dissident writers whose lives and struggles enlighten and inspire us. One of the writers, Iryna Khalip, has since been arrested in Belarus and charged with criminal acts for speaking out against the government.

A class of students could develop a series of articles around their own theme, or write articles to add to one of our series.

On This Day Challenge

A student (or group of students) chooses a significant event from women's  history and uses the Web to research and gather information on the chosen event. Using critical thinking and analysis skills, the student then writes an article on the event, citing the Web sources. We provide specific instruction on how to write an On This Day article, and offer a dozen examples of events from women's history on this page.

Create Videos or Slideshows Instead of Articles

To create a video portrait of a woman or series of women, students could use a screen capture software product, such as Camtasia, to capture text, images and excerpts of videos of the women profiled, or a product such as Animoto to create a narrated video slideshow. Both products' websites offer extensive tutorials. In each case, students must conduct Web research, and then assemble the images, write a script, and create the end-product. The students' work could be displayed on a school website or their own blogs, or Teacher Tube or YouTube, and thus reach audiences across the globe.

Resources

To support students, we offer these resources:

• SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students,
• Ten Steps to Better Web Research,
• How to Avoid Plagiarism by Paraphrasing Correctly, and
• How to Synthesize Multiple Resources into an Article.

Opportunity for Students to Get Published

In the 21st century, everyone is a publisher. Students must learn to create work that is seen outside the walls of their school building. We'll happily publish on findingDulcinea any student work that you submit to us that links to excellent online resources and is well-written for the student's grade level. Alternatively, we'll publish a series of blog posts throughout the month that highlight and link to student projects on school or student Websites. Note also that the On This Day Challenge, discussed above, offers a more formal opportunity for students to get published and win prizes.

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In conjunction with findingEducation, we've launched the On This Day Challenge. We're asking students to write articles about historic events by conducting online research, with chances to win gift cards and cash and have their work published on findingDulcinea.

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more.