The findingDulcinea Blog

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

 

 

 

 

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."

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search Skills of the Lost Generation

The New York Times Website reported today on "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search." It details how J.C. Penney manipulated Google’s search results to rank first for search terms such as ”dresses” and “bedding.” The article follows another NY Times article, "A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web,” which described how a crooked retailer’s Website ranked high in Google for "eyeglasses," because of links from highly critical Web postings.

In today’s article, Matt Cutts of Google defended his team’s efforts to combat search engine spam, noting that “[s]pammers never stop.” The article offers data that explains spammers’ persistence: on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic goes to the No. 1 result, about twice what goes to No. 2 result.

Google cannot reasonably be expected to anticipate or immediately counter every scheme. The solution to this problem is not to shame Google into working harder to fight spam. The solution is education. Internet users must learn how to find information online effectively, so they are not as heavily influenced by the first search results on a single search engine. Unfortunately, study after study shows that the vast majority of Internet users, including college and high school students, cannot effectively use the Internet to find, evaluate and use the information they need in their daily lives. This is a much more profound problem than whose Website shows up first for "dresses" or "eyeglasses."

A 2008 survey commissioned by Yahoo! found that 85% of initial search queries fail to return the information users were seeking. A 2008 research review by the University College of London exposed as a myth the notion of a “Google Generation” of young people with native ability to find information online. In 2010, we conducted our own study of 300 high school and middle school students. When we asked how they knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were "if it sounds good" or "if it has the information I need." Two-thirds of students said they “rarely” or “never” check the author or date of an article, with some adding that “it doesn’t matter who wrote it” and “you can never find the date.”

An article in Inside HigherEd last fall laid bare how dismal the research habits of college students are. The article reported on a presentation by Andrew Asher, who had studied the search habits of more than 600 Illinois college students, nearly all of whom reported relying heavily on the first few results on Google for their research. He quoted a sophomore biology major: “I’m just trusting Google to know what are the good resources.” And yet Asher reported that “of all the students that I interviewed, not a single one of them could give an adequate conceptual definition of how Google returns results...The word 'magic' came up a lot."

Asher’s findings sync with the conclusions of the 2008 University College of London research review. It reported a "new divide," finding students who had access to effective research training from librarians in high school "taking the prize of better grades," with those who didn’t have such access showing up at college "beyond hope," having "already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to 'get by' with Google."

That many college students are “beyond hope” was echoed by three college librarians in the Inside Higher Ed article. A Seton Hall librarian told Inside Higher Ed that "unless we can demonstrate some measurable payoff to searching, students aren’t going to do it."

How much does the unwillingness of students to learn research skills contribute to what experts call a “lost generation” of chronically unemployed, or under-employed, workers, resulting from a mismatch of workers' skills and employers' needs? Would you pay someone to do "research" for you that consisted of summarizing the first links on Google? Or would you instead hire one of the few people on the other side of the "new divide," who knows how to find the best information available anywhere?

Will this "lost generation" phenomenon continue with current students? Our experience suggests that, for many, it will. Dulcinea Media is continuing to develop SweetSearch and our other tools and content that help educators teach students how to use the Internet effectively. While reviews of our products are almost unanimously glowing and their use is growing nicely, a barrier to their wide adoption by schools is the status quo - textbooks and other crude tools from the 19th century that remain the primary method by which students learn.

We realize that most classroom teachers generally lack the time and experience required to teach intensive online research skills, and thus school librarians play a critical role in preparing students to succeed in the current marketplace. Yet around the world, many school librarian positions are coming under the axe as school boards begin to consider next year's budgets.

Conversely, we've come across hundreds of schools with very strong library programs that anchor a true 21st century curriculum that teaches students the skills they'll need to succeed in the workforce. We're encouraged that our presentation on teaching Web research skills has been downloaded 21,000 times in four months, and is being taught as part of the curriculum at colleges of education and library science. Students who learn these skills will become the eventual political and business leaders of our world; students who don't will continue to get tripped up by scammers who finagle a high position in Google's search results.

Mark Moran

CEO

 

 

Educon - Keynote from Educon, by Leroy Nunery

I'll be sharing informal posts from Educon throughout this weekend.

Chris Lehman, Principal of Science Leadership Academy, welcomed everyone.

Chris spoke of Friday's events. The students of SLA had planned presentations for months, which were to be given to early attendees on Friday. At 7:00 a.m., Chris sent out the news that Friday would be a snow day, and school would be closed. By 7:01 a.m., students were texting Chris to ask "what do we need to do?" More than 100 students showed up to make their presentations.

Chris: the goal of the weekend is to set ourselves up to innovate. He challenges us to CONNECT - it's a challenging and exciting time to be an educator; we need to connect with like-minded, dedicated, passionate educators to renew ourselves to face the challenges ahead.

He challenges us to LEARN - deeply, from each of the sessions. Take time to reflect on it. Walk out of hear Sunday with a plan, so that Educon lives beyond Sunday and the walls of this building. Learn, and develop a plan for change.

Saturday morning kicked off with a keynote speech by Leroy Nunery, Deputy Superintendent, School District of Philadelphia.

Leroy: Educon is not a conference - it's more like a "revival." Strong spirit to it.

Budget issues we are facing right now are the scariest of our lifetime. This is being seen across the country. Low or no growth in revenue, federal ARRA stimulus is going away. We do not regret spending the stimulus to save jobs and make investments - that's what stimulus is.

Like many districts across the country, we are looking at our Master Plan; we realize we have 70,000 unfilled seats, due to demographic shifts and no population growth in Philadelphia. Many of our buildings are decades old, with deferred maintenance issues. How do we adjust our physical facilities to create better learning environments for our students?

Half our high school students cross the city, using public transportation, to a school of their liking. The Master Plan is to make it easier for students to find what they want closer to home, including through the use of technology.

What we face as a public entity is what private businesses face: competition. There are many charter and private schools in Philadelphia, and their numbers are growing. "Cyber Charters" are growing rapidly, enabling students to learn from home. A "Blended Environment" is emerging, where students will learn, at least in part, from home.

What's the value of what you provide? Compared to what's out there privately. We need to establish our value proposition, justify it to the public and policymakers.

Enrollment has dropped 10,000 since 2006, projected to drop another 10,000 by 2016, to 145,000. 70,000 empty seats right now - enough to fill Lincoln Field (football stadium).

"Imagine 2014" - extensive discussion with the public on "must have" needs for schools. The public loves the opportunity to have input. You often hear that schools should cut the arts, music, foreign language, athletics. Yet these are mentioned most when the public is asked what schools need. Security and comfort also ranks high - clean bathrooms, security cameras, green spaces and playgrounds. Series of workships around the city in the next two weeks.

Consolidation presents opportunities. Resource efficiencies, program realignment, service alignment, and program enhancement. Stop hiding behind bureaucracy.

Program realignment - try to match school curriculum to the marketplace. Are we generating too many chefs, and not enough specialists in biotechnology and agriculture?

What do we do?

Be creative!!!!

Optimize opportunities - consolidate underutilized facilities, collaborate with other districts (500 in PA!), institutions, corporations, leverage best practices.

Can education reform? Hyundai, Subaru, VW are proof you can.

Create Centers of Excellence that leverage existing competencies, existing know-how and existing space.

We need to re-think how we use space. Individualize learning.

What is the value of a seat? Instructional costs - teachers, materials, admin staff. Non-instructional costs: facilities, utilities, maintenace staff, transportation, community and neighborhood impact. He wants communities to be proud of their neighborhood schools, and for the local kids to want to go to their local school.

Definition of a "Quality Seat."

SchoolNet Instructional Management System gives one-stop real-time access to all student data for admins, teachers and parents.

Trying to be creative, find best of breed content partners.

How do we attract the best teachers to Philadelphia and have them ready to teach? Attrition is also an issue. Lure of suburban schools - safer, quieter.

Current Status of Classrooms: 4,000 upgraded classrooms with interactive whiteboard, projectors, teachers with computers.

SDP STEM Education Programs - decrease the opportunity gap and increase the STEM pipeline. How do we replicate SLA? How do we show our students they don't need to leave city schools to learn STEM?

Working with U Penn, Franklin Institute, Temple.

STEM Classrooms, STEM Clubs, Integrated STEM courses.

Out of school programs. Collaborate with professionals and industry. Help them find local talent.

Mobile lab equipment.

Mark Moran, CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transforming Web Research for Students

   

   

 

 

Today we introduce a significant change in the functionality of SweetSearch.

 

All search results pages on SweetSearch are now automatically enhanced by Yolink.

Together, SweetSearch and Yolink utterly transform Web research for students.

 

Studies show that students, even at the college level, rarely review more than the top three search results, and almost never look beyond six. Studies also show that most students lack the experience and wisdom to differentiate between credible results and misinformation.

 SweetSearch, enhanced by Yolink, enables students to review a long list of vetted search results, quickly zero in on the ones that are most relevant to their task, and then save those results to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib's citation generator, Diigo, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Web-based email accounts, etc.

 Web research has been transformed, from a task few students could effectively tackle without close teacher guidance, to one that many students should be able to navigate on their own.

 The search results pages of other search engines display 10-20 words of context around the search term; in most cases, this is not nearly enough to determine whether a search result is truly relevant to your task.  As a result, most users click-through to every search result, in order.

 SweetSearch’s results, enhanced by Yolink, now show from 100-400 words of context around search terms. Each word in a multiple word query is highlighted in its own color. A searcher can, at a glance, scroll down through all 20 results shown on the first results page and determine which ones appear to be the most relevant, and then click through to them.

 SweetSearch is a Google-powered custom search engine that only searches 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts deemed credible. Awareness and use of SweetSearch is now growing explosively in schools throughout the world, garnering outstanding reviews from publications and education bloggers from the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

 Tech journalist Paul Gilster compared SweetSearch to Google and Bing and found it much better for finding authoritative resources. He wrote, “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 provides students with a list of credible results, and Yolink helps them determine what’s relevant from this credible list, by providing the expanded view of the results.

 Let’s take a look at an example of how SweetSearch, enhanced by Yolink, greatly facilitates browsing through search results to find the exact document you need.

 Today I searched [Sacagawea children] on SweetSearch and Google. Both engines showed a link to a PBS documentary on Lewis and Clark near the top, that briefly discusses Sacagawea’s son and daughter.

 But SweetSearch’s results show full context around all of its results. In seconds, a student can glance through all 20 results on the first page, and quickly lock in on the 17^th result – the “feedback” page from the PBS documentary referenced above – which a Google user likely would never have found. The author of the documentary provides full detailed answers to questions, including “What Happened to Sacagawea’s Children?” which is highlighted in color on the search results page.  It is a concise answer from a noted expert on the topic – perhaps the best search result on the Web for this query – and it was found in seconds.

 

Yolink enables SweetSearch users to browse a list of 20+ credible results, quickly.  Using other search engines, students are met with a mix of credible and not so credible results, and rarely venture beyond the first three.

 For a full explanation of how we created SweetSearch, read “Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students.”

 To add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch;

 Click here to get a widget for SweetSearch or SweetSearch4Me, to embed on your school Web site.

 Mark Moran

Founder & CEO

Educators Will Create the Successor to Textbooks

This summer, The New York Times featured yet another article on how to replace textbooks. Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, estimated that the U.S. education system spends $8-$15 billion per year on text books. One study claims that only 11% of this expenditure actually goes to creating content. Of course, printing, distributing and disposing of textbooks also comes at an enormous environmental cost.

The primary alternatives discussed in the NYT article are open-sourced, digital textbooks that can be customized by an educator.

But while the successors to textbooks surely will be digital, they won't be a textbook at all:

• They won't be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year's Texas controversy;
• "chapters" won't reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of educators; 
• in subjective areas, they won't require students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and
• they won't impose a "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of 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.

There are a number of approaches that could render a product that meets the above objectives. However:

• A Wiki that is subject to the whims of a narrow band of editors with a lot of time to devote to winning ideological battles would preclude the involvement of the contributors with the most to offer;
• a "silo" approach to publishing, where educators post work only on their own school sites, will inhibit the collaboration necessary to develop depth, breadth and scale quickly; and
• there must be some central administration to continually enhance the solution in response to educator feedback.

At the recent Techonomy Conference, Bill Gates predicted that in five years, the best college education will come from the Web. But in many subjects, innovative educators are already using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. Thousands of teachers and librarians around the world 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. These teachers are also creating lesson plans and assignments that test students' critical thinking and relevant communication skills, rather than prepare them to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. And they teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life, and not a textbook that will soon join a landfill.

Many of these educators post their assignments on the Web; often on a school Web site, sometimes on a blog or other platform. This spring, when my daughter and her friends became concerned one of their  teachers wasn't adequately preparing them for an Advanced Placement Exam, they sought out materials on the Web, and eventually settled on a teacher in Northern Virginia as having the best exam prep materials. Everyone in my daughter's group passed the exam, while several of their classmates did not. I recently learned about a remarkable site for teachers and students of English created by Sandra Effinger; I foresee AP test takers from all over the country accessing her resources in coming years; here is a similar site for high school psychology.

The number of sites like the ones offered by these two educators will grow exponentially in coming years. What is needed is a central repository that collects many of them, so that teachers can access assignments created by other teachers, and learn from, and build on them. And if that repository was also one that made it easy for teachers to find great resources in the first place, and provided a free mechanism for sharing the resources and assignments with their students and colleagues, well, all the better. And if it promised a whole host of new features in the near future? It could very well become the successor to textbooks.

And that is what our free product, findingEducation, offers. It's in Alpha stage, and we can do a lot to make it better, but in its current form, the potential for it is clear. Its back-end is powered by SweetSearch and the content of findingDulcinea to 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, and then share them with students on their assignment page. It combines assignment management and quality resource discovery into a “digital classroom.” Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, with their own look and feel.

The ultimate value in findingEducation comes when it becomes heavily used by outstanding educators. For example, once hundreds, or thousands, of U.S. History teachers create assignments for, and provide links to materials about, the U.S Civil War, then a new teacher entering the fray can create a new assignment that synthesizes the best of the predecessor works. Teachers can identify other teachers who consistently create outstanding assignments, and use them as a model for their own.

What will it take for findingEducation to create a critical mass that will turn it into a "must use" tool? Sponsorship by a large education entity or organization that will encourage use by a substantial number of members. We can even create a separate file for these organizations to co-brand the offering and make it easy for members of the organization to find each other's work. Organizations such as AASA, NSSSA, NCSS, and ALA should have a keen interest in discussing this possibility with us, as should state and regional education departments.

We have a number of modules and additional features that can be introduced into findingEducation once it develops a meaningful user base.

For more information on findingEducation:

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

Take our site tour.

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

For more information or to contact us with inquiries, comments or feedback, e-mail info@findingeducation.com or write me directly at Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

Olympic Athletes Compete With Technology

With these Olympic Games comes a whole new way to keep up with your favorite athletes. Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have gotten much more popular and mainstream since the last winter Olympics. In fact, Twitter didn't even launch until March of 2006, and its number of users has grown exponentially since then.

So some are dubbing the 2010 Vancouver Olympics the "Twitter Olympics," because the athletes are more in touch with the everyday population than ever before. But is the constant communication and unedited flow of personal messages good for the Games and for the athletes' performances?

Gillian Reagan of the Business Insider points out that while there are rules and regulations regarding the information that athletes can publish about the Olympics, the easy access and widespread use of new technologies has presented some gray areas as far as what is allowable content for athletes to post. For example, the rules state that athletes can't "report" on events, ceremonies, behind-the-scenes happenings or other athletes, which makes it seem like they can't use social media tools during the Olympic Games at all. But later it seems that the rules were cleared up, and that athletes and personnel can post updates about the Olympics, just no updates, pictures or video during competition or the opening and closing ceremonies. The full rules can be found on the Olympic official Web site.

The Montreal Gazette reported that more than 80 of the 200 U.S. athletes have Twitter accounts, and coaches and others worry about the potential for distraction from the new tools. Psychologist Barbara Meyer, who is working with a few athletes in this Olympic Games, has advised some to stop using the social media tools during the Games to limit distractions. “Anything that increases anxiety or is a distraction has the potential to affect performance,” she told the Gazette. Some athletes have slowed down; for example, snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis hasn't been Tweeting for most of February (see her account).

But other athletes might be reluctant to stop tweeting and Facebooking. Some say they really enjoy the support they get from fans, and others like to be able to give supporters an insider view of some under-appreciated sports. 

And for those of us not in the Olympics, it seems undeniable that we enjoy having the access to the athletes. Skiier Lindsey Vonn has more than 56,000 followers on Twitter (see her account), and many other athletes have gained substantial followings during the last few months (see a list of U.S. Olympian Twitter accounts). It will be interesting to see what technology has in store for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Forget the Textbook; Will the iPad and Kindle DX Help Lighten Students' Backpacks?

With the recent unveiling of Apple's iPad, which looks like an oversized iPhone, some publications have begun to speculate that the new touch screen, keyboard-free netbook will also double as a textbook.

The reason for the speculation is that the iPad will feature an iBookstore along with its iBooks application, which will allow users to download and then read books on their device. If that sounds like something you've already heard of, you're right. The new app could make the iPad a competitor to Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader.

And bringing a digital device into the classroom is nothing new, either. Last year, Amazon began attempts to integrate the Kindle DX, a larger version of the original Kindle, into the classroom. It gave away a couple hundred of the electronic readers to college students, with mixed results.

According to an article by Jessica Mintz of the Associated Press, while students liked that the Kindle DX allowed them to access a number of textbooks in one device, some students missed the old-fashioned method of notetaking and dog earing books. Professors found it hard to direct students to the proper page numbers in textbooks because the Kindle DX doesn't number pages, and students can choose the size of the text on each page, potentially creating a different number of pages.

Will Apple's iPad be able to overcome some of the Kindle DX's hurdles in gaining wider use in schools? And will readers prefer the iPad screen for reading compared with the Kindle's screen, which was designed to be easy on the eyes? That remains to be seen. For now, some of the major publishers have already started working on developing iPad applications for study help, but no official word on the actual texts being converted for the iBookstore. 

With the cost of the iPad and the Kindle DX both inching toward $500, even if the texts are cheaper than the hard copies, it is hard to say whether students and parents will want to invest in the products. Many students already have MP3 players and schools have invested heavily in netbooks and computers. Is the technology compelling enough for them to spend more money to get the devices?

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

When Tragedy Strikes: Social Media Grows Up

When an earthquake struck Haiti earlier this week, people around the world read about the tragedy almost instantly. For many, news of the quake came not from traditional media outlets but from their profile pages on Facebook, or through a tweet from a friend on Twitter.

With phone lines down in most of the country, only those with access to satellite forms of communication, such as Internet-enabled mobile phones, could communicate with the outside world.

Within hours of the earthquake, images, videos and status updates flooded the Web with news about the disaster. People experiencing the quake in Haiti were able to share what was happening with the rest of the world using social media tools, long before volunteers and reporters could make their way to the country.  CNN published many of these updates to its iReport section, and that part of its site saw nearly 1.5 million visitors the day of the quake.

For some victims, social media has proved to be a lifesaver. The Miami Herald reported that many users from outside the country were able to post where they thought loved ones might be trapped, asking for help from anyone who might be in the area. For those trying to locate loved ones, Facebook and Twitter have helped the news spread more quickly than watching TV or reading the newspaper.

Even the rescue teams in Haiti are now heavily reliant on social media tools to communicate with each other. Groups from Canada and the U.S. are using tools such as Skype and Twitter to give each other vital information because phone lines are not working.

Long have social media users been accused of "slacktivism," a term Pete Cashmore of Mashable says refers to the endless posting of messages and online groups that don't achieve much, but allow social media users to feel like they are doing their part. But with the Haiti earthquake, organizations employed a relatively new method of gaining support: asking users to send text message donations that would automatically add a few dollars onto their next phone bill. It has been hugely successful, with the red cross having raised more than $8 million so far.

But even with all the good that social media tools have enabled people to do, not all efforts are safe. Rumors circled on Twitter and other social media sites that JetBlue and American were going to fly volunteers to Haiti for free. This turned out to be untrue. At this time, no airlines are able to fly passengers into Haiti due to congestion and lack of fuel at the airport. Though some airlines are offering frequent flier rewards for members who give monetary donations to the relief effort.

Learn more about Haiti in our blog post from yesterday.

Read how you can help quake relief efforts in this findingDulcinea article.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

As Libraries and Librarians Are Cut, We Need Them More Than Ever

Congress recently reintroduced the SKILLS (Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries) Act, a bill that aims to get at least one library media specialist in every public school by the 2010-2011 school year. By doing so, it sent a strong message: that leaving students in an unstaffed room with computers, books and other media, without guidance on how to use that media, is unacceptable.

Even as schools across the country continue to cut their library staff and book budgets, more and more schools are adding computers to the classroom. Now that students have more access to the Web than ever before, how are they suppose to make sense of all the digital information they encounter on a daily basis?

As findingDulcinea founder Mark Moran points out on his blog, founding Dulcinea, “As good as your kid may be on Facebook, she is not born with a digital M.L.S. These skills are learned, not instinctive, and the only way for students to learn them is for someone else to guide and teach them.”

This is where today’s school librarian comes in. Forget the “1950s bespectacled stereotype,” Moran writes. Today’s library media specialist is on the cutting edge of information literacy and poised to share expert digital research skills with students and teachers.

In support of educators looking for quality Web resources to share with colleagues and students, we launched Web Links, a collection of useful Web sites organized by school level and divided into student and teacher pages.

We also offer “10 Tips for Researching on the Web,” a list of quick suggestions that can help you find what you’re looking for faster, and help you make sure the source is reliable.

Colleen Brondou