findingDulcinea

90 Years of Pursuing Equal Rights

On March 22, 1972, the Senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned discrimination on the basis of sex. The amendment fell three states shy of ratification and was never ratified. Read our full article for the 90-year history of the proposed amendment. Andrew Lloyd Webber was born in London on March 22, 1948. Considered one of the most successful contemporary composers, he has consistently created works that garner international appeal and success. He has created scores for "The Phantom of the Opera," "Evita" and other highly successful productions, and earned several awards to commemorate his musical achievements. Read our full profile.   BBC Newsround features this amazing collection of wildlife photos that are about to go on display in the London Museum.   National Geographic's photo of the day is of the moon illuminating the North Face of K2.

 

Presentation at New Leaf in Learning

On Thursday, March 22, 2011, I will make a presentation titled "Overcoming Resistance to Teaching with Technology and Online Resources" at the 2012 New Leaf in Learning Conference.

 Here are links to the presentation and the sources and quotes contained in it.

I provide full contact info and information about Dulcinea Media as well.

Overcoming Resistance to Teaching with Technology and Online Resources

The printed description of this presentation:

This session will illustrate how library media specialists can become a persuasive, supportive and indispensable resource to classroom teachers who might be reluctant to embrace online resources and educational technology. Mark Moran of Dulcinea Media will discuss a wide array of content resources, discovery tools and education technologies, and how many teachers are using them successfully in class. Participants will also learn the root of the most common objections to the adoption of a new way of teaching, and how to overcome such objections by dispelling fear and doubt, providing ample support, and celebrating successes.

The guiding question: "What are the principles that should guide education companies and educators as they support classroom teachers in embracing online content, relevant technology and a student-centered teaching style?"

This presentation is a PowerPoint that is available on SlideShare by clicking here.

The links contained in it are repeated at the bottom of this post for your convenience.

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

Dulcinea Media offers free products that help educators teach students how to use the web effectively. These products are discussed comprehensively in these blog posts:

Web Guide to Education

SweetSearch Page for Social Studies

SweetSearch Biographies

Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students

findingEducation - How to Leverage the Wisdom of a Crowd of Educators

We've also partnered on the LineTime World History Timeline an app for iPad and iPhone that enables students to scroll through all of modern history and then zoom in on particular decades, years, months and events.

Here is a description of Teaching Web Research Skills, a research-based, multimedia tutorial that teaches effective web research skills to both educators and students; it will be available in early April 2012.

Here is a link to reviews of Dulcinea Media's products by leading educators, publications and journals.

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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SOURCES IN PRESENTATION :

Dulcinea Media Intro (see links above)

The Problem

Dangerously Irrelevant - We Spend 80% of Classroom Time on Skills Needed in 10% of Jobs

Peter Pappas - Taxonomy of Reflection / @edteck

Khan Academy - the Golden Ratio

Henry Jenkins - TedxNYEd

Dirty Little Secrets of Search Skills of a Lost Generation

Overcoming Resistance

EdWeek - 10 Reasons Educators are Resisting Your Change Initiative

The Journal - Training Teachers of 21st Century Classrooms

The Atlantic - Empowering Students to Pursue Their Passions

Learning from Your Peers

School Library Journal - Things that Keep Us Up at Night

SSChat Ning

EdChat

TLChat

History Teacher's Attic and Ted Talks Demystified

The Primary Resource Librarian / @johnsonmaryj

Unquiet Librarian - Taking Embedded Librarianship to the Next Level

Primary Sources

Yale - the Avalon Project

Ohio State - eHistory

Library of Congress Primary Source Sets

American Rhetoric

Miller Center - American Presidents

Miller Center - Address from the Brandenburg Gate

Interview of the Day - Amelia Earhart

Living Room Candidate - Jackie Kennedy

Chronicling America

Letter from Harry Truman on the Process for Deciding to Drop the Atom Bomb

Historic Newspapers and Magazines and Newsreels

British Pathe

Rag Linen

Sports Illustrated Vault - A Case of Conscience

Museum Syndicate

The Mike Wallace Interview - Orval Faubus

BBC Interactive Timelines

YTTM

 LineTime World History Timeline

Primary Access Movie Maker

Digital Docs in a Box

ThingLink

Games, Simulations

History Animated (animations of historic battles)

 The Doolittle Raid

Games For Change Third World Farmer

Content-Specific Resources

 

Smithsonian Ocean Portal

National Genome Research Project - Education

BBC Science - Interactive Body

NSDL.org

Wolfram Alpha Educators Page

 Economics Search Engine

 

Ideas for Lesson Plans

Teachinghistory / @teachinghistory

History Matters

PBS Learning Media / @PBSLrnMedia 

EDSITEment! / @edsitement

DocsTeach

Teaching High School Psychology / @highschoolpsych

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Textbook: How to Leverage the Wisdom of a Crowd of Educators

Tomorrow, a stellar group of brilliant, dedicated educators is meeting at Discovery Education in Maryland for a session titled, “Beyond the Textbook.”

This follows on the heels of the recent SXSW Edu conference that featured more than a dozen sessions on Open Education Resources (OER).

Clearly, the long-predicted demise of the physical textbook is imminent (though “imminent” has a much different meaning in the education field than elsewhere).

Unfortunately, when it comes to discussions of “Beyond the Textbook,” many people cling to the familiar, comforting and convenient notion of a textbook, albeit one in digital form. Apple’s introduction of the iBook several months ago was met with great fanfare.

However, digital textbooks suffer from one fatal flaw: they are textbooks. As education professor Alec Couros Tweeted last recently, “as long as there are textbooks of any sort, there will be no reform.”

Digital textbooks are, in the words of Pete Townsend, a case of “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”

• Digital textbooks, if created by education companies, are still susceptible to politically driven agendas. This is a phenomenon that has been around for decades, and perhaps centuries, not merely since the 2010 Texas controversy;
• Even when created by educators, digital textbooks likely will reflect the perspective of a small number of authors, rather than the collective wisdom of thousands of experienced educators, and they are likely to draw on a more limited pool of open education resources than they might otherwise;
• We may find that educators using digital textbooks do not update them as often as they should to leverage newly available content or learning tools;  
• Like conventional textbooks, digital textbooks are likely to be 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; and
  
• Digital textbooks largely impose a "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

What should come next?

Hopefully, it will not be something created by large education publishers desperately seeking to replace their textbook revenue. At SXSW Edu, Pearson presented an early version of its OER solution; it clearly had a very different concept of “open” than most of the attendees in the session. Pearson plans to charge a substantial sum for access to its platform, another concept that was met with groans from the audience.

Discovery has also introduced a digital textbook, with all of the above limitations, and I presume it intends to charge a significant sum for it. If this is the spotlight of tomorrow’s meeting, I’ll be curious to see the reaction of the educators attending, whose “buy-in” Discovery may be seeking.

I also have my doubts about the successor to textbooks being created under the auspices of a state department of education. I saw several OER platforms created by state education departments on display at SXSW Edu. They all offered some very promising features. However, a common thread is that all of them currently lack a critical mass of high quality OER resources. In other words, they have built it, but not enough educators have come. In each case, I sensed the platforms relied heavily on a database-driven design that was simply too cumbersome for the average, overwhelmed teacher to use. I had the same visceral reaction when I was given an overview of NYC Schools’ ARIS System in 2008 – in addition to its data tracking capabilities, it had a platform for educators to bookmark and share digital resources, albeit one that was clearly far too unwieldy to be used widely. While the ARIS platform is still in use, one writer has deemed it a “$100 million white elephant,” and reported that some schools are instead paying to license another system – one built by teachers.

Indeed, what comes after textbooks should be something created to leverage the wisdom of a crowd of 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.

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.

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. They teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life.

Many of these educators post their assignments on the Web. Unfortunately, it is probably a rare case where people outside of the educator’s own students see the great work the educator is doing.

What is needed is a single, central repository that aggregates the work of great educators and makes it easily searchable. Teachers should 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. 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.

To put a smiley face on a despised term, it would create a "Race to the Top," but one 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 find the best online resources about any subject – the first critical step in educators creating OER;
• 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.”  All of the content on this platform is chosen by educators;
• Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, and yet remains on the central repository so that it is easily discoverable by other educators;
• Educators must be permitted to make use of each other’s work, without restriction;
• For findingEducation, or any other tool, to replace textbooks, it needs a critical mass of educators from one subject using it regularly; we’ve had advanced conversations with a group of educators who may help us attract 2,000-5,000 other educators to begin using the platform; and
  
• While we likely won't be able to offer the platform free of cost forever, we don't envision charging more than $20 per user per year.
  

We’ve spent five years creating resources to help educators teach students how to use the web effectively. Our mantra from the beginning has been to simplify, simplify, simplify. While we believe that findingEducation is far simpler to use than any other OER platform we’ve seen, we actually have been ruminating about ways to make it even easier to use and search, and will be implementing them this year.

We have a number of modules and additional features that can be introduced into findingEducation once it develops a meaningful user base, and of course will create other features based on user feedback.

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 [email protected] or write me directly at [email protected]

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

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