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

Materials for Presentation at LISMA, Sept 29, 2010

I'm presenting today at the first meeting of the school year of the Long Island School Media Association, at Garden City High School, at 4 p.m..

Here are links to all of the materials that I will be presenting; I provide full contact info at the end.  

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

One part of my presentation is a discussion of the free products offered by Dulcinea Media. These are discussed comprehensively in these two blog posts:

9 Ways We Help Educators Teach Students How to Use the Web

How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The second post repeats a fair bit of the first, but adds specific insight into our content for social studies teachers.

These two posts above themselves link to just about everything else I'd want you to read about our company, but for your convenience, I repeat some of the most important and relevant links below:

Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students

Transforming Web Research for Students

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

            Click here for widgets for SweetSearch and our other products.

Educators Will Create the Replacement for Textbooks

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET IN SCHOOL

This presentation is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. The links contained in it can be opened by clicking on the slide page, and are repeated below for your convenience.

Things that Keep Us Up at Night

Younger Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

Angela Maiers: Learning Now

A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

It's Broken, Let's Fix it: the Traditional Model of School Librarianship

Dalton Sherman, Dallas ISD

SweetSearch School Librarians

TEACHING TEN STEPS TO BETTER WEB RESEARCH

The presentation on "Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web Research" is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. The links contained in it can be opened by clicking on the slide page.

CONTACT INFO

Do not hesitate to contact me at Mark [dot] Moran [at] DulcineaMedia [dot] com or call me at (917) 597-3815 with any questions.

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How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The Web contains millions of primary source documents, such as letters, diaries, photographs and videos, and contemporary news accounts. It also contains innumerable reflective essays written by experts who are much more conversant with the topic than a general writer for a textbook publisher.

But few educators have the time to sorting through literally billions of Web sites to find the rare gems that lend students a greater understanding of a subject. Traditional search engines aren't helpful; they sort by relevance, not by credibility, and often can't filter finely enough to help you find what you're looking for.

What you need is expert human curators to highlight the material worth your consideration.

Click here to read reviews of our work by well-known educators and journals.

Our landing page for Social Studies reflects the effort of two dozen full-time researchers and an equal number of teacher consultants who have brought order to the best social studies content available online.

Begin each day by perusing our SweetSearch2Day, which is a daily curated assortment of the best content on the Web for current events, history, language arts, science, culture and other topics. Better yet, sign-up for our newsletter, and at 6:00 a.m. NY time, we'll send you links to the most intriguing content on that day's page. For examples of the newsletter, click here and here.

Our seminal article, "101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class," points you to gems such as:

• Rag Linen, which contains copies of original newspapers from the 18th century, including accounts of the French & Indian War;
• The Mike Wallace Interview, a collection of 66 interviews from the 1950s with luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Pearl Buck and Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Harp Week, which examines presidential elections, the Civil War, Reconstruction and other events of 19th century America through the articles and cartoons of Harper’s Weekly.

To provide a practical use for the many interview sites we've uncovered, we publish "Interview of the Day," which leads you to some of the most compelling video, audio and text interviews of the 20th century. Do you teach your students about Amelia Earhart? We found three newsreel interviews with her from 1928. How about Eleanor Roosevelt? Watch the interview she gave to Mike Wallace in 1957, in which she remarked about The Cold War, "I feel quite sure that the American people, if they have knowledge and leadership, can meet any crisis just as well as they met it over and over again in the past.”

The On This Day articles that we publish each day 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 hope you'll encourage your students to elevate their research and critical thinking skills in our On This Day Challenge, which offers them step-by-step instruction, prizes, and a chance to be published.

Students need role models, right? We've written thousands of headline articles; high school librarian 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.

When Iran violently suppressed protests last year, we wrote 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, and an intriguing story about killer whales who cooperated with Pacific Island villagers to trap, kill and mutually share other whales. For other examples of how we help social studies teachers teach students to think for themselves about what we call the "fragile truth of history," read this blog post.

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."

Our Features section contains a wide range of articles of interest to educators. For example, we hear often that students struggle to find good material for country and state reports. So we published "Sites for Learning About Countries," which links to the best 18 sites we found, for younger and older learners, as well as "Sites for Learning About the 50 States." We also know that students often study inventors and inventions; our Innovations series discusses, and provides outstanding research resources about, the complex history behind the inventions of modern mainstays such as the bicycle, refrigerator, vacuum and autopsies.

Because our content is so vast and voluminous, we've created special collections pages. Teachers often tell us that students all want to write about the same events and people, year after year; Jackie and Rosa for African-American History Month; Eleanor, Florence, Betsy and Oprah for Women's History Month; Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa for Global Studies. 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. After a librarian told us that students all write about the same events and people from the Holocaust, we created this collection of Holocaust material as the antidote.

Our thousands of articles build upon the dozens of Web Guides you'll find in the left-hand column on the social studies landing page. Nearly all were created by outstanding teachers of the subject/grade level covered. The guides are comprehensive, narrated tours of the best content on the Web for teachers, students and parents, and directly link you to the best primary sources about a subject. The guides typically track the teacher writer's syllabus.

Overlaying it all is SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It only searches 35,000 credible resources that our research experts and educator consultants have approved when creating all the content discussed above. We also spend our Saturdays trolling through lists of sites recommended by social studies educators, vetting them ourselves, and adding those that pass muster. Because we know that a great resource for a high school student is not necessarily a great resource for a fourth grader, we've also introduced SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently features on the first results page the high quality Web sites created for elementary school students. Read this blog post to understand more about how we created SweetSearch, and its integration with Yolink, a remarkable tool that helps students quickly browse through rows of search results without opening them.

Though your students will now be using the best search engines for students, they should still learn the Ten Steps to Better Web Research. To help them, we've published this presentation on Teaching the Ten Steps, which has gotten more than 12,000 views in its first two month.

Once you've found all these great Web resources, you'll want to share them with your students, and colleagues. So we created findingEducation, a bookmarking and sharing tool that we describe in this blog post as your digital classroom. If exploited by educators to its full potential, findingEducation will become the free, paperless successor to those expensive, landfill-busting textbooks that burden your students backpacks each year.

At this year's annual conference of the National Social Studies Supervisors Association, we gave this presentation on "A Practical Approach to Integrating the Web and Technology into the Social Studies Classroom." Feedback on the presentation has been stellar, and indeed we've already been invited to present at next year's conference, as well as a half dozen state and regional conferences. This blog post has links to the many stellar examples of effective use of the Web by educators, as well as other outstanding social studies resources.

Please send me feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. on our Social Studies content and tools, to Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

I've Graduated from College. Now What?

Over dinner a few weeks ago, I listened to a group of my closest friends lamenting the economic crisis and the death grip it held on their efforts to find jobs. One friend pointed out that I was unusually calm, despite the fact that I had hardly started my job search and that those companies to which I had applied had turned me down. She suggested that I, with my optimistic temperament, write an article for findingDulcinea about how frenzied graduates should relax and try to have fun looking for jobs in today’s economy.

Weeks later, after a particularly painful evening of scouring idealist.org only to conclude that I am probably not skilled enough to even manage a hot dog cart, I came into work discouraged and exhausted. The Editor-in-Chief asked how things were going, and I confessed that the job search was taking its toll. When she suggested the same thing my friend had—that I write a graduates’ job search guide—I was stunned. Who am I to tell my peers how to find a job? I haven’t even found one for myself yet! I’ve lost all focus of what I want to do after graduation and have experienced only failure in my search efforts so far. But she insisted that I AM an expert, because I am in the thick of it, or as she put, “in the forest” (implying that the job search is a dark, wooded area … fair enough).

Writing this three-part series (see links at bottom of article) has turned out to be the most useful thing I have done to advance my personal career search, far exceeding the seminars I’ve attended and the hours I’ve wasted aimlessly browsing my university’s job postings online. I learned about job search Web sites that I never knew existed, many through findingDulcinea’s existing career Web guides. I took a personality quiz (to ensure that the Web site’s evaluation tools were reliable, obviously) and found that I might be well-suited to a career in advertising, teaching or consulting. I hit the jackpot when I found a series of videos hosted by Pricewaterhouse Coopers; every tip was a new gem that I have since incorporated into my search tactics.

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m pretty biased when it comes to going overseas. In my opinion, any experience in a foreign culture will make you a more interesting, well-rounded, thoughtful, understanding, independent and expressive person. In my research for the third part of my series, “Work, Intern or Volunteer Abroad,” I learned about dozens of language immersion opportunities in other countries and have since decided to move to Costa Rica for several weeks this summer to learn Spanish.

So thank you, findingDulcinea, for helping me with my own job search. Hopefully the features I wrote will help other recent graduates get on the right track or, at the very least, will inspire them to form a more positive attitude about the process.

Erin Harris

UPDATE:

Erin wrote this blog post in May 2009.  A year later, she is working as a research assistant in the Genetics Department at Children's Hospital Boston. She's taking classes at night to prepare for a program in physical therapy, an area that she has gotten interested in since starting her job at the hospital.

As for the job search itself, it wasn't an easy, but Erin offers some tips that worked best for her:

1. Don't underestimate paper: Sure, maybe its more convenient to apply for jobs via your iPhone, but sending an application in the mail can make a huge impression. I would suggest still sending an electronic version as many employers require it, but those applications often get routed to a large pool of applicants, which I call the nebula, because once your name goes in, it often disappears forever. Take a few minutes to look up the name of an HR representative, and send a hard copy of your application directly to that person. Oftentimes, the rep will get back in touch with you or will forward your information on to the appropriate hiring manager.

2. Talk: Introduce yourself to someone who works at a company you are interested in and ask them if they would be willing to have an informational interview with you. This is a chance for you to ask questions about the person's day-to-day job, the company atmosphere, how awesome the holiday party is, etc. without the pressure or a formal suit-and-tie, sweaty-hands interview. I asked several people, from study abroad counselors to marketing associates to an English professor, out for coffee to learn more about what they do and not once did I get rejected. People love talking about themselves and this can be a great way to get your foot in the door.

3. Network: Yes it is awkward, but it can be fun and turn out some great connections if you step outside of your box. I showed up to an alumni networking event in Boston, and tried to balance eating mammoth-sized pieces of sushi with presenting myself as a mature, appealing job candidate (the oversized finger foods were intentional in my opinion...a challenge set forth by the NYU event planners who stood by and chuckled as we introduced ourselves to CEO's with half-eaten chicken skewers in our hands). Somehow, I walked out with 10 business cards and a job offer at a consulting firm in downtown Boston.

and finally...

4. Stay positive: It will happen. As long as you are trying, you will get a job.

Good luck!

Read the three articles in Erin's series:

The Post-Graduation Job Search: Find You Fit

The Post-Graduation Job Search: Taking Action

The Post-Graduation Job Search: Work, Travel or Volunteer Abroad

Discovering Primary Source Material

Primary source material—such as journals, speeches, letters, contemporary news reports, government documents, photographs, artifacts and maps—is an invaluable resource in understanding history.

“Primary sources provide a window into the past—unfiltered access to the record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement during the specific period under study, produced by people who lived during that period,” writes the Library of Congress.

Digitized archives make it possible for students or amateur researchers to access and search primary source collections. Much of the material is not easily accessed through search engines.

Searching for a specific Civil War battle, for example, will lead you to plenty of secondary sources and a few primary sources. However, you are not likely to find battle reports and letters sent between Union and Confederate leaders and their respective War and Naval Departments, which are available in the Official Records. Similarly, you will probably miss first-hand accounts written by those leaders after the war, which have been collected in the Battles & Leaders of the Civil War and the Southern Historical Society Papers.

Our goal at findingDulcinea is to direct you to collections like these. As we develop our history section, each guide will have sections devoted to primary source archives. Currently, the guides on Native Americans, the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II all have these sections. Most of our On This Day features link to primary sources either in tables at the end of a section or in a separate Reference section at the end of the article.

For help in learning how to use primary sources, visit the Library of Congress’ Primary Source Sets section and the National Archives’ Teaching With Documents section. Both provide lesson plans on a wide variety of topics.

Denis Cummings

Steal Our Homework! Plus 7 More Ways Teachers Can Enjoy Dulcinea Media

A lot of people ask us, “So what is Dulcinea Media?” Translation: “How do you actually make my life easier?” We’ve come up with some responses.

1. Steal Our Homework
Each Thursday, the Digital Teachers’ Lounge, our blog for teachers, educators and librarians, publishes a quiz about the week’s Happy Birthday and On This Day features. The answer key is released the following Monday. This makes a great homework or extra credit assignment.

2. Save Time Hunting Down Sites
When assigning a research project, you may spend your weekends searching for credible resources your students can use. Our Web guides do that for you. For example, our Web Guide to U.S. History features only useful sites that cover the time of the early settlers to the 1970s, including primary sources.

3. Use Our Web Links
Don’t teach history? No problem. Find some of the best sites for your grade and subject in our Web Guides or on our Web Links page. It includes links by school level for Math, Science, Literature, Geography and four different languages. It also includes links for other topics such as Applying to College and Differentiated Instruction.

4. Try Our Search Engine
Did I mention we have our own search engine? It’s called SweetSearch [http://www.sweetsearch.com/] and it surfaces only the best sites—those used in our guides, features and news—plus others we’ve hand-picked.  Use it – and tell your students to use it – to find great resources on any subject, quickly and efficiently.

5. Give Your ESL Students a Hand
Because native Spanish-speaking students may have trouble finding resources on the Web, we created EncontrandoDulcinea. Now Spanish speaking students and their parents can locate the best sites in English and Spanish, for most academic subjects. Students that are learning English or Spanish can also read a number of our news and features on both sites.

6. Share Our Expert Tips for Writing Biographies
We’ve gathered advice from experts, authors, journalists and others to help students research and write a profile. We’ve also pointed them to some of the best sources. (Note: Every one of our Happy Birthday profiles includes a “Sources in this Story” bar highlighting sites we’ve used in our own research.)

7. Discuss Our News Stories
Each day we publish news stories for students. All of the content is based on, and links to, the best resources on the Web about the topic. Whether the focus is on the environment, technology, health or education, you’ll always find something worth chatting about.

8. Sign Up For Our Newsletter
We know teachers get tons of e-mails but this is one you’ll love. You’ll get our weekly quizzes (see No. 1) sent straight to your e-mail box. And you’ll also get a teaser for our weekly interview, where you can learn great tips about working with kids in schools and libraries.

Help us help you. E-mail us at info@dulcineamedia.com or direct message us on Twitter @findingEdu and let us know what we can do better. We’d love to hear from you.

How to Make and Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Eve is less than 48 hours away, so it’s about time we shared our 5 tips for making and keeping your New Year’s resolutions.

1. Think Hope, Not Guilt. Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, writes, “Other people's ideas of who you should be and what you should do can go right in the delete file.” New Year’s is a time to feel inspired, not ashamed. Look back on your favorites moment of 2009, and imagine 10 experiences you look forward to in 2010.

2. Choose One Thing. Just one. Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” suggests, “Make a promise and keep it.” Check in with yourself weekly. After successfully meeting one goal, you’ll have the confidence to take on another.

3. Get the Wording Right. Penelope Trunk, an author and founder of the blog “The Brazen Careerist,” says you should break down your goal into tasks. Instead of telling yourself you need to go to the gym, Trunk suggests saying, “I need to drive to the gym at 4:30 every day and I cannot drive out of the parking lot until 5:30.”

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help. Martha Beck, a life-coach, columnist and author, writing for Oprah.com, outlines four different personality types: quick starters, fact-finders, implementers, and follow-through types. When looking for support in committing to a resolution, partner with others who share your goal but have different strengths and weaknesses.

5. Track Your Success. Use a site like 43 Things to measure your success. Sign up, create an account, outline a strategy and find other people who share your goals.

Find more of the best sites for keeping your resolutions in findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to New Year’s Resolutions.

What I Didn’t Know About Tiananmen Square

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

In the spring of 1988, I traveled to China with a small group of other high school students and a much larger group of older adults. I’ve always liked to say that I learned more about American tourists during that trip than I ever learned about the Chinese. There were the two ladies who refused to eat anything but white rice. The woman who had to keep purchasing new luggage to fit all the souvenirs she was buying. Her daughter, who was so focused on videotaping everything, that she never seemed to look at anything with her own eyes. The man who thought it was funny to kick the back of my seat on every short plane flight, and who apparently decided that the very real machete fight that we inadvertently witnessed and which left one man with serious head wounds was light entertainment put on for his benefit.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have any encounters with the people who actually lived there. Unlike my trip the previous year to what was then the Soviet Union, no one tried to block us from making contact. The other students and I talked with young people on the streets of Shanghai who were anxious to practice their English, waved to an adorable, rosy-cheeked kindergarten class who chanted “Good morning! Good morning!” as we passed, ignored the desperate vendors who tried to sell us trinkets through the windows of our bus and watched an elderly woman with bound feet painfully limp down a flight of steps in the Forbidden City, leaning on the arm of a soldier.

Although my high school friends and I felt that we were obviously better behaved travelers and more open to truly experiencing the country than the adults with us, that did not mean that we ever really had a clue about any of China’s most pressing political issues. One peaceful evening in Beijing, we lay in the middle of Tiananmen Square and sang “You Can Call Me Mao,” parodying a song popular at the time, Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” A little more than a year later, that spot was overrun with protesting students, tanks and soldiers firing on civilians.

It was deeply upsetting to me that a site I associated with a silly memory became associated in the eyes of the world with such horrifying bloodshed. It’s equally upsetting that in the 20 years since, the Chinese government has made significant efforts to obliterate all recall of that terrible event, and have forbidden people to commemorate it in any way. During the days leading up to the anniversary this year, authorities have tried to block discussion about it on the Internet.

Learn more about what happened in June 1989 by reading findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Partnership with El Especial

A month ago, we announced our Spanish-language initiative and began publishing several of our guides in Spanish for our bilingual audience.  This initiative is generating strong, high-quality traffic and positive attention from potential media partners. 
Today, we announce our first syndication partner for this initiative. El Especial, a chain of Spanish-language newspapers, will be highlighting findingDulcinea’s content as a weekly feature in its print editions. We will continue to translate more Web Guides into Spanish and plan to create a mirror Web site that better surfaces this content.

On Internet Privacy, Fend for Yourself

The Washington Post ran a story ten days ago about the FTC's review of behavioral targeting by Internet advertisers.  The Internet privacy issue is much more interesting to privacy advocates and journalists than to the average Internet user.  Most people have little interest in the issue, and those who do care about it protect themselves with cookie deleting or ad-blocking tools that are inexpensive and readily available. The FTC has repeatedly told Congress that it already has all the regulation it needs to protect Internet users, because deceptive practices are already illegal, and almost any egregious intrusion on your privacy can be connected to a deceptive practice.

With my strong understanding of the Internet marketing landscape, I recommend to friends that they familiarize themselves with the information that marketers collect. When it crosses the boundary of their personal comfort zone, take action. Often that's as simple as opting out or adjusting browser tools. Do not rely on the government law or regulation to protect you; the landscape shifts too quickly for that ever to be effective.

For instance, many search engines, by default, track every search query you enter, particularly if you have an account with the search engine and are signed in.  Some people view such a history as a benefit, because they can retrieve old searches and perform them again. To others, it's creepy. And fortunately for those in the latter group, most search engines make it easy to opt out of having their  search history collected.  Likewise, some Internet service providers are working with marketers to track every single Web site you ever visit, and then create a targeting profile.  As long as these ISPs adequately (that being the critical watchword) disclose their practices and enable users to opt out (which they can do by switching ISPs, for starters), there is no need for the government to do anything more, other than ensure there is adequate competition in the marketplace.

How do you familiarize yourself with Internet marketing practices? FindingDulcinea's Web Guide to Internet Marketing and Privacy covers both off-line and online marketing practices as well as how to take steps to opt out of practices you personally are uncomfortable with.

Mark Moran
Founder and Chief Executive Officer