findingDulcinea

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

The Importance of Great Educators, Again

Six months ago, we blogged about the importance of great educators. It's a topic we celebrate regularly, particularly in Educators That Rock, a series of profiles of educators that inspire us. The occasion then was an article we had written about how difficult it can be for students from rural communities to apply to top colleges. We spoke with Angela Bakker-Lee, who had ventured from a rural town to Stanford University, a Marshall Scholarship and a career as a healthcare consultant. Angela credited several of her teachers, particularly Linda Lee Tatro, for helping Angela recognize and realize her potential:

"I have no doubt that knowing her changed my life. She encouraged me in a way that no other teacher had up to that point. She had more confidence in me than I did. And I think she was the first adult to really talk to me."

This week, teachers came under attack from talk show hosts and many others who have spent little time in classrooms. They made broad statements about fixing "the" education system, as though it were a monolith with a fixed set of problems, rather than an amalgamation of individual districts spread across our federation of 50 states, each with its own particular problems to address - sometimes teachers, sometimes administrators or severe budget cuts or external phenomena, sometimes parents and students themselves.

Happily, I've also come across several more affirmations of the importance of great educators, and the impact they can have on students.

The greatest wisdom often comes out of the mouth of babes, as I learned, again, when I came across this two-year old video featuring Dalton Sherman, then a fifth grader. Addressing 20,000 educators in Dallas, he told them, using a rhetorical style as convincing as you'll ever hear:  "here’s the deal: I can do anything, be anything, create anything, dream anything, become anything -- because you believe in me, and it rubs off on me....In some cases, you're all we've got."

The next reminder came from our Interview of the Day from yesterday, featuring Maya Angelou. As so often seems to be the case, her early life was not what you'd ordinarily expect to lead to awards and nominations from Grammy, Emmy, Tony and Pulitzer. At 7, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, which led her uncle to kill the rapist. Stunned by the episode, Angelou refused to speak for four years, and found solace only in poetry. In a 1987 interview with CBS Radio, Angelou explained how a teacher, Mrs. Flowers, conquered a 12 year-old trauma victim's refusal to speak:

"She said, 'you can’t love poetry. In order to love poetry, you must speak it. You must feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.’ … She was trying to shock me. And one day I went under the house … and I tried poetry. And I had a voice. I had a voice.”

The final reminder this week came from a blog post written from the heart of Sarah Edson, a teacher at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn. I met Sarah this summer at #ntcamp in Philadelphia, an educator managed "un-conference," a growing phenomenon in which teachers create their own professional development, on their own time, with their own money.

Anyone who has been to an un-conference would not broadly proclaim that teachers are the problem with "the" education system. #ntcamp was the starkest evidence I've seen yet of the profound commitment of many teachers to creating new, and relevant, approaches to education. Originally envisioned as a small program where experienced teachers would share tips with new teachers, #ntcamp was attended by more than 100 veteran educators who assembled at Boys' Latin Charter School at 8 a.m. on a 102-degree Saturday.

Many were from the greater Philly area, New Jersey and New York; plus dozens of out-of-towners such as retiree Jerry Blumengarten, up from Florida; Pam Moran and Paula White from Albemarle County, Virgina; Steve Anderson from Winston-Salem, NC; Kyle Pace from Lee's Summit, Missouri; Shannon Miller from Van Meter, Iowa; and Elizabeth and Kristina Peterson, sisters-in-law who drove 7 hours from New Hampshire, overnight, after attending a wedding till 11 p.m. the night before, and arriving in Philly at 6:30 a.m. It was an amazing day of learning from an inspiring group of educators.

Sarah Edson was one of the few relatively new teachers there, and evidently she also was quite inspired by it, as well as by lessons learned from her educator mother, who passed away a decade ago. Sarah poignantly relays the experience of tending to her terminally ill mother for weeks, and the powerful lessons it taught her about paying close attention to a person's needs. She concludes by vowing:

"I will continue to attempt to connect with each of my students, even in the face of unresponsiveness.  I will maintain hope.  I will celebrate each success.  And I will pay careful attention just in case I discover that a student, in her own way, has shown that she needs me."

It's here that I am supposed to conclude the post with a particular insight of my own. Instead, I invite you to re-read the words of Angela, Dalton, Maya and Sarah about the importance of great educators:

"I have no doubt that knowing her changed my life. She encouraged me in a way that no other teacher had up to that point. She had more confidence in me than I did. And I think she was the first adult to really talk to me."

"Here’s the deal: I can do anything, be anything, create anything, dream anything, become anything -- because you believe in me, and it rubs off on me....In some cases, you're all we've got."

"She said, 'you can’t love poetry. In order to love poetry, you must speak it. You must feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.’ … She was trying to shock me. And one day I went under the house … and I tried poetry. And I had a voice. I had a voice.”

"I will continue to attempt to connect with each of my students, even in the face of unresponsiveness.  I will maintain hope.  I will celebrate each success.  And I will pay careful attention just in case I discover that a student, in her own way, has shown that she needs me."

Mark E. Moran
Founder & CEO

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 [email protected]

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

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

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

Marty McFly and Traveling through Time, by Teaching History

“Back to the Future” was released 25 years ago this week. When Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, first entered a date into the DeLorean’s time machine, it was July 5, 2010. Many on the Internet noted the date this week and concluded that if Marty actually arrived today, he’d quickly get back in the DeLorean and move on, or back, to some other date.

 Of course much of Back to the Future was played out in the past. And that’s where I prefer to spend a lot of my time, as well. As I’ve written often, the key to foreseeing the future is understanding the past. That’s why much of the heart of findingDulcinea is devoted to helping students use the Internet to understand the past.

 Our On This Day feature remains the most popular section on the site. And my favorite “On This Day” date is the Fourth of July, one of the only days on the calendar on which we simply had to write about three historic events.

Our three On This Days for the Fourth of July explain how America announced its Declaration of Independence, two of its founding fathers died within hours of each other exactly 50 years later, and how, in 1939, a legendary athlete told a sell-out crowd at Yankee Stadium that, notwithstanding the diagnosis of a terminal illness he had just received, he was “the Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth.”

 Shortly after we sent our newsletter for the Fourth, I received an email that channeled Marty McFly: “amazing history. I've been dreaming that someday someone would invent a time machine because I am not contented with what I merely read. I want to see it if I could live in every time there is a great event.”

 And my immediate thought was that there is a way to go Back to the Future, to live in the time of a great event: teach about it. As a Contracts tutor in Law School, the subject came alive for me much more than it did as a learner. Next, I had the pleasure of visiting a number of kindergarten classrooms to read. I never went with just a book. By carefully introducing a number of props, I transformed beyond a mere reader – to the kids, I was Captain Hook, the Cat in the Hat, the Mouse given a cookie.

 And now I’ve helped create findingDulcinea, and continually discuss with students, educators and others some of the amazing things I’ve learned by researching or reading the articles on our website. What we offer goes beyond mere reading – to really engage someone in the importance of an event, you need to travel back to it – by viewing primary sources, such as pictures, videos or letters – and hearing the accounts of those who were there, or lived contemporaneously.

Last summer, I visited the restaurant founded by Jim Croce, one of my music idols. Displayed there were walls of pictures of Jim in concert and with his family, his guitars, and other memorabilia. But it was only when I saw the framed sheet containing the original writing of “Time in a Bottle” that Jim was no longer gone three decades; he was standing right next to me; I was awed by how the writing was so simple and yet conveyed so much. And thus all of our articles and Web Guides about historic topics offer all the primary sources as we can find on the Web. And discovering great events and finding the best primary sources on the Web to share with our readers helps me feel, in a small way, part of the event. But I am envious of those who regularly get to travel Back to the Future to these events with a class full of eager young learners.

Thank you for reading.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

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

The Importance of Great Teachers

Over the past year, FindingDulcinea has spotlighted several amazing educators, such as Alan Haskvitz, an American teacher who has taught nearly every grade level and core subject over the past 20 years, and written books and articles about education. Our Educator Profiles on the findingEducation Digital Teachers' Lounge are further proof that there are countless educators driven to make a real difference in their students' lives.

Recently, we published an article about students in rural districts and whether they get a fair shot at top tier colleges and universities. In addition to discovering eye-opening information about the challenges faced by students outside of cities and wealthier suburbs—fewer mentors who've attended Ivy League schools, for example—the article introduced us to an amazing woman named Angela Bakker-Lee, a native of the rural town of LaCenter, Wash.

Bakker-Lee granted findingDulcinea an interview in which she discussed the positive influences she was lucky enough to have while growing up. Teachers like Linda Lee Tatro helped Bakker-Lee discover that there was a big world outside of her hometown.

"I have no doubt that knowing her changed my life. She encouraged me in a way that no other teacher had up to that point. She had more confidence in me than I did. And I think she was the first adult to really talk to me," Bakker-Lee explained.

After attending Stanford University and being awarded a Marshall Scholarship, which allowed her to study in Europe, Bakker-Lee settled in New York, where she works in management consulting. Although she’s clearly a naturally driven person, Bakker-Lee credits her teachers in LaCenter for their encouragement and belief in her when she started applying to highly competitive schools.

“Two of my favorite teachers were exceptionally supportive and excited for me: Sharon Bryan (English) and Joanne Bevans (Biology/Chemistry). They encouraged me to do it, and never seemed to have any doubts that I would make it to my goal. That meant a lot to me, knowing that they believed in me,” Bakker-Lee says.

Of course, getting into college is just the first step. Even after they've graduated, students can always use an extra confidence boost, especially knowing they're up against a shaky economy. May is almost here, and you'll find tips for what to give new grads in our feature on Finding the Perfect Gift for Your College Graduate.

Sarah Amandolare

Senior Writer

Question Number One: Who Wrote This?

Finding information on the Internet is like being a good police detective: the information is only as good as its source. And, like a good detective, a good Web researcher never decides to use information without considering who gave it to him. He asks, “Who created this Web site, and who is the author of the content I'm reading?”

Now, this may seem obvious, but when we asked 300 students how they know they can trust information on a Web site, very few of them said they look at the site's publisher and its authors. And I've even way too many adults recommend a Web site even though the site itself offered no information about who created it.

Is the site's publisher a scientific journal, a law firm, a university or a well-established news organization? Are the writers professors, journalists or experts in the field?

Does the site employ a whole editorial team, with full-time writers and skilled editors who review everything, or are the publisher and writer the same person—someone with a lot of knowledge about, and passion for, the topic? If the latter, is he just publishing the site as a hobby? If so, the consequences for getting information wrong are minimal.

Is the author simply trying to entertain you, or sell you something, or get you to donate money to a cause?

Who cares? Google sorts this all out for you, and lists the sites from the best writers first, right?

Wrong.

In fact, the opposite is usually true.

Someone who wants to sell you something works hard to make his site rank higher than it should. And someone who is passionate about a topic and unburdened by journalistic or academic guidelines may write an entertaining article that is linked to often and thus ranks well in search engines.

On the other hand, many experts and professors don't even try to make their Web sites rank high in search engines.

When I explained why SweetSearch was the best search engine for students, I showed several examples of the biggest search engines giving prominence to sites that didn't say who they were published by or who authored their articles.

So how do you find out who published the site and why?

The “About Us” section of a site is a good place to start. If the site doesn't list the name of the publisher and its management team—and this is often the case—then hit your “back” button and visit another site. You would never trust a book without knowing its author and publisher; why would you trust a Web site without the same information?

But the “About Us” can't be the end of your research. Look for additional information about the publisher or author and their credentials elsewhere on the Web site, and then by searching their names in a search engine. Any reputable publisher or author should be mentioned on other reputable Web sites. For an author, search the name along with key subject words to see if he or she has written other articles on the subject for other publications. Usually someone who is an expert on a topic writes about it often for several different publications.

Now that you know how to find out who wrote this, also ask:

Question Number Two: Why Did They Write This?

Question Number Three: When Did They Write This?

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

The two most important questions to ask when evaluating a Web site

Many students evaluate Web sites using a long list of criteria, but pay little heed to the most important two:

Who publishes this Web site and wrote its content, and why?

When we asked 300 high school and middle school students how they know they can trust information on a Web site, few mentioned evaluating the site's publisher and its authors. Further, I've seen hundreds of cases where intelligent professionals have recommend, or cited, a Web site without knowing who published its content. When I evaluate a Web site, "who" and "why" are the first questions I ask, and it often only takes me a few seconds to decide to move on to the next Web site.

The publisher and its authors may be scientists, doctors, lawyers, or professors seeking to enhance professional reputations. Or it may be a news organization staffed by people with years of journalism education and training, with strong editorial guidelines, and a veteran editing team. The site may be published by an intelligent person who has a lot of knowledge about, and passion for, the topic, but who is publishing the site as a hobby, and doesn't necessarily care if he gets it exactly right.  It may have been written by someone who is merely looking to entertain you.  Or sell you something, or get you to donate money to a cause.

I've listed these types of possible authors in order of credibility. You might think that this also reflects their ranking in major search engines. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Someone looking to sell you something devotes a lot of resources to manipulating search engines so his site ranks higher than it should. And someone who is passionate about a topic and not burdened by journalistic or academic guidelines may write an entertaining site that is linked to often, and thus ranks well in search engines. Conversely, professional and academic experts usually put no effort into making their Web sites rank well in search engines.

When I explained why SweetSearch was the best search engine for students, I compared its search results for "War of 1812" and "Shakespeare" to those of Google and Bing. Those search engines prominently listed sites because that were recently published, and whose purpose was to get you to visit a city or watch a movie. Others were trying to sell you products, or were written by people whose credentials were little more than "I really love Shakespeare." Do you want to trust your grade to information found on any of these sites?

So how do you find out who published the site, and why?

The “About Us” section of a site is a good place to start. If the site doesn't list the name of the publisher and its management team - and this is often the case - then hit your Back button and visit another site. You would never trust a book without knowing its author and publisher; why would you trust a Web site without the same information?

But the About Us can't be the end of your research. Look for additional information about the publisher or author, and their intentions, elsewhere on the Web site, and then by searching the names in a search engine. Any reputable publisher or author should be mentioned on other reputable Web sites. For an author, search the name along with key subject words to see if he or she has written other articles, for other publications, on the subject. Usually someone who is an expert on a topic writes about it often, for several different publications.

Once you know who published the Web site and wrote the content, you have to ask, "Why?"

When we create our Web Guides for findingDulcinea, we usually provide research strategies that caution you to be wary of sites that aren't what they seem. We've come across dozens of Web sites that appear to offer valid information but in fact were created for another purpose. Some of these we explained in a feature called "Suspicious Sites," that is an ideal tool for learning how to decipher "why" a site was created. Many Web sites provide so-called information about a health topic, but were published by lawyers looking for medical malpractice clients. We've uncovered Web sites that appear on the surface to provide good information about mortgages, financial advice, insurance, plastic surgery options or drug treatment centers, but their only purpose was to collect your personal information so they could sell it to companies or individuals offering those services. In a more common example, recently we wrote about a highly celebrated woman who achievements were the subject of a good faith, historic dispute; we noted that a government-funded "Hall of Fame" site failed to even mention the controversy. The stated purpose of the site was to honor woman who have made lasting contributions, and apparently it felt that this mission would be compromised by reporting the controversy.

In all these cases, publishing accurate, balanced information was not the primary purpose of the Web site.

Of course, you should use a full list of criteria when evaluating a Web site. But as soon as a Web site loads on your computer, ask yourself "who" and "why"?

Mark Moran

Founder & CEO

NYS Social Studies Conference: Teaching a Little, Learning a Lot

Last Thursday, Dulcinea Media CEO Mark Moran and I gave a presentation on improving Internet research skills at the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYCSS) conference in Rye, New York. We were delighted with the response from the attendees. Our presentation is now available online; it includes the results of our survey of online research and best practices for using Facebook, Twitter, Diigo, and Skype in the classroom.

Even though we were invited to the conference to teach what we know, we came away learning a lot more than we taught. Because we weren't exhibitors at this conference, I attended many of the other presentations. It was almost impossible to choose between them, as there were usually 12 panels happening at once, but I lucked out when I chose Bill Reilly’s.

Reilly is a 6th grade teacher at the Bethlehem Central Middle School in Delmar, NY, and founder of the Global Coalition Project. In 2006, he won the Disney Teacher of the Year award for bringing “real world learning” experiences to his students. In the last few years, he developed the Global Coalition Project, a network of students in 20 different countries that share letters, life stories, and artwork, and hold discussions over Skype. The Global Coalition Project even has its own international news program, showcasing news reports from student reporters around the world. To learn more about Reilly and his work, visit findingEducation's “Educators that Rock” page later this week.

In another presentation I attended, “If You Can Say it You Can Write It,” the presenters (Jeannette Balantic of Garden City Public Schools and Maria Carnesi from Plainview Old Bethpage Schools) explained how teachers could “optimize instruction time” by having students write shorter assignments, while increasing their frequency. Brilliant! They likened the process to coaching a basketball game: “coaches give feedback the whole time kids are playing from the sidelines. When they realize kids are in trouble, they call a time-out.”

Because students rarely read and absorb the comments written on long essays, grading a full sample essay every week is not a good use of time and effort. For example, A.P. U.S. History teachers can help students practice writing the DBQs for their exams by having them write just the introductory paragraph for five weeks until they’ve mastered it, then move on to body paragraphs. This practical approach lets you root out problems and intervene early.

After a night of carousing with Benjamin Franklin, Benedict Arnold and other re-enactors at a historic tavern, I attended a few more presentations on Friday.

That day’s highlight for me was Tom Daccord’s presentation on effective online history research. Online research is a major part of my job, and while I thought I knew most of the secrets, there’s always something more to learn. Daccord, a former teacher, now co-founder of EdTechTeacher and author of two books, explained that “the heart of effective search is keyword search."

For example, if you ask students to find primary sources for movies in the 1920s, those that don't type "primary sources for movies in the 1920s" will search “movies” and "1920s." But students need to stop, think, and reflect. Daccords asked his audience, "What might be some contextually, historically appropriate terms?” The term “movies” was not widely used in the 1920s. So in this case, “films” or “pictures” may be more relevant. Next, students should consider what kinds of resources they hope to find. They could add other keywords such as “newspapers,” “posters,” “articles,” and “interviews.”  In addition to his demonstration of Google’s WonderWheel and Timeline features, this nugget about keyword search was a terrific take-away.

I gained so much practical wisdom from NYSCSS, and left feeling inspired by the teachers and educators I met.  I'm now really looking forward to the next conference!

Thank you to everyone who participated, presented and shared their insights with me.

Shannon Firth

Senior Writer and Audience Development Coordinator

Finding The Real Source of Your Source

There is so much posting and reposting of content online these days, that it can sometimes be difficult to discover the true original source of a story.  Once a story becomes popular on the Web, thousands of copy cat stories crop up everywhere, often quoting or summarizing the original and not as often giving proper credit. The reason many stories online get sensationalized is because people just copy and recopy information from one source to another, without bothering to verify the source.

While using those less-than-reliable sources can be an easy way to read information, it can sometimes mean that the info you are getting (especially with a developing story) is dramatized or just incorrect. When doing any kind of research, you want to get as close to a primary source as possible.

So how can you find the true source of your information in a world overrun with automatic news aggregators? You have to use a little detective work.

First, evaluate the credibility of the source you've been sent.  Is it a trustworthy news source or publication, or is it a site filled with adwords and random content scraped from the web?  For tips, see our "How to evaluate web sites" from our On This Day challenge materials.

If you find that the source you're reading from doesn't look totally credible, look through the content of the story  and see if you can spot any attribution or links to an original piece. 

If that isn't available, try going to a news source you already trust and searching for some of your subject keywords to see if you can find a more reliable version of the story.

OR

If you think the story you read might be a copy from a legitimate source, try searching for an exact phrase from the story in a search engine by using quote marks.

If the news is about a person or organization, see if you can find their own web site for commentary or updates.

Video clips from YouTube or other video hosting sites can be tricky to locate the original source of.  Look for any kind of watermark or logo within the video itself to determine the original source. If you know what program the video came from, search on that network's site to see if it has been made available for the public. Unauthorized copies of videos are often removed after a short time, so using an unauthorized video clip in research may mean that you won't be able to refer to it later, it is best to find the original source if possible.

If what you are looking for is an older source, try looking in newspaper archives or library archives, you'll be surprised how much information is available to those who look a little deeper. 

And of course, primary source material is always your best bet, for places to go to find primary sources, read our blog post from a few weeks ago, "Discovering Primary Source Material."

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Let It Snow: Weather in the Classroom

To many students, bad winter weather means time off from school and time out of the classroom. This past weekend, The Associated Press reported that 49 out of 50 U.S. states had snow on the ground; that’s a lot of happy students.

But bad weather doesn’t need to be an impediment to a child’s learning. An impending storm can be the perfect segue into a lesson on weather. The Web has some valuable resources on the subject for teachers and students.

Teachers: Before instructing students on the finer points of weather science, refresh your own understanding with a visit to NASA’s World Book. The NASA entry on “Weather,” written with contributions from the extensively qualified Joseph M. Moran, Ph.D., discusses what causes weather, how it’s measured and how humans impact it.

Once sufficiently refreshed, visit the Discovery Education “Lesson Plan Library” for ideas on how to teach students about weather. You’ll find 12 lesson plans covering topics such as “Understanding the Weather,” “Mountain Barriers,” “Avalanche!” and “Hurricane!”

The BBC offers inquisitive readers a weather center with links to detailed explanations of natural weather phenomena; this is a good place to find answers to specific questions.

Curious how meteorologists generate daily forecasts? Hint: It’s more sophisticated than voodoo or trips to the local psychic. FindingDulcinea’s Nature Wages War series offers a look at how groups such as the World Meteorological Organization and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration predict both extreme and benign weather events.

Finally, Mark Twain's famous line that "everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it" is no longer completely true. In "Seeding the Clouds for Drought Relief," findingDulcinea discusses efforts to control the weather by Venezuela (to end a drought), China (to ensure clear skies for the Olympics' Opening Ceremonies), and others.

James Sullivan

Editor

A Visit to the Springfield Township High School Library

Through the glass doors of the Springfield Township High School Library, you can see a life-size cutout of Robert Pattinson, the lead actor in “Twilight,” standing on some shelves. Pattinson’s defiant presence, front and center, signals who runs this library: the students.

I walk in and spot Dr. Joyce Valenza, the school’s library information specialist, through another window, one that peeks into her office where she sits consulting with a student researcher. She apologizes for not being able to shake my hand (she has a cold), and welcomes me and begins telling me about some of the projects her students are working on.

She introduces me to her assistants Patty Gee and Casey Arlen, who rave about findingDulcinea, then the study hall students, who greet me politely, and the U.S. History II students who are focused on their computers.

Mr. MacFarland’s history students explain that they are creating an online textbook that covers material their textbook leaves out. Valenza reminds these students that the Google News Timeline and Fact on File’s World News Digest—one of many databases available to the students—are great places to begin their research.

She also reminds them about Dulcinea Media’s SweetSearch tool, which I’m excited to see is listed on her search page. I mention that our site also has a brand new Biographies page. A few minutes later I see two girls scrolling through a findingDulcinea profile of Michael Phelps.

In one darkened cove, a projector screen is lit up behind Mr. Alexander, who is giving directions to students researching their senior seminar. In another room, Mrs. Mazurek’s eighth-graders are comparing products online using Google Squared. The other half of Mr. MacFarland’s class, the half not creating textbooks, is watching a history movie that introduces a new unit; the area is often used for student presentations, Valenza explains. She guides me through the reference area, the magazines aisles and the student-run art gallery. Outside the gallery is more art: painted pottery dishes, medieval castles, models of the Great Wall of China and a life-size wire sculpture one student made of himself.

When we return to her office, Valenza shows me the keynote presentation she helped students in a musical theater class put together for a K-12 Online Conference. The German students created their own art museums, with introductions written and scripted entirely in German. World History II students also created interactive museums of artifacts of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Reformation using a variety of tools that included Glogster, NoodleTools, Animoto, Wikispaces and VoiceThread. “Sometimes even after the class was over, they just wouldn’t leave,” she said, laughing.

The whole time I’m there, a student, who introduces herself as Maya, is working quietly at a computer in the back of Valenza’s office, wearing headphones. She takes them off to explain her project: a stop-motion animation about the future of libraries. Characters—an old man and an ‘80s fairy—were drawn, cut out and moved around a background, and then photographed hundreds of times. I ask how she gets the characters to stay in place for each new scene. Without a trace of condescension in her voice, she answers, “They’re aerial photographs.” Of course, I think. After she leaves, I ask Valenza what class Maya is making the animation for. I’m not surprised to hear that it isn’t for credit at all; it will be used in advocacy efforts supporting school library information programs for students that don't have them. Maya and a few other students volunteered their study hall time to create a PSA that will be used by the Spokane Moms and others.

Toward the end of my visit, I run into the school principal, Mr. Hackney, who tells me about his first trip to the library. He remembers walking in and hearing lots of chatter and noise, so he started “shushing” people. “Everyone started looking at me funny,” he said. “Now I understand. It’s a working library.”

Beyond Jackie & Rosa: Helping Students Find Unfamiliar People to Write About for Black History Month

Recently, my daughter’s Global Studies Class was asked to write a biography about a famous woman from Asia, Africa or South America. The teacher said that in the prior school year, 90 percent of the students chose Mother Teresa. The teacher promised bonus points for anyone who chose an unfamiliar woman. 

Together we reviewed our “Happy Birthday” feature and found 11 women from these three continents. A week later, Maggie claimed her bonus points, and indeed knocked the teacher’s socks off, by turning in a well-sourced paper on  Wangari Muta Maathai, the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The experience gave rise to SweetSearch Biographies.  

Maggie's assignment reminded me that students are often asked to write a biography about a significant person from a particular profession, gender or race/national origin. We knew we had hundreds of biographical profiles in our Happy Birthday, On This Day and features sections, and that to make them easily accessible, we had to put them all in one place and allow students to sort them.

SweetSearch Biographies launched last week, and offers well-sourced profiles, or the SweetSearch results page, for more than 1,000 significant people, and can be filtered by profession, gender and race/national origin. One elated school librarian cheered the timing, at the beginning of Black History Month, as she was "a little weary of Jackie and Rosa who are of course important but sometimes you need to stretch a bit to someone unfamiliar." Given the 80+ profiles of African-Americans, students should be able to knock their teachers’ socks off by finding someone unfamiliar. 

(Note: One state's student assessment division recently asked to license our biographies for the state's elementary school ELA exams. They gushed that our bios were so well written - organized, concise and full of information. So not only do our biographies served as examples of good Web research and writing, but reading them also prepares students for assessment exams!)

(We are updating all of the content from findingDulcinea and republishing it on SweetSearch2Day, its eventual successor).

Here are links to five people whose life stories amazed me when I first read about them on our Website:
 

Elizabeth Blackwell

Thor Heyerdahl

Miriam Makeba

Rita Moreno

Witold Pilecki

 

Thank you for reading,

Mark Moran

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

School Libraries Cut Databases; Effective Web Research Skills Will Become Paramount

Recent cuts in state school spending are causing school libraries to reduce the availability of expensive databases of journals and periodicals. While this will surely result in making it more difficult for students to complete research assignments, it may also force them to improve their ability to use the Internet effectively.

As Joyce Valenza explains in a recent post for School Library Journal, Pennsylvania has cut its subscription with EBSCO, which hosts electronic databases of publications and journals. EBSCO content has long been a “critical tool” for schools and public libraries throughout Pennsylvania, according to Valenza, who wonders how she’ll “cover the gaps” without additional funding.

Echoing Valenza’s concerns is Kristin Hokanson, a technology integration specialist for Pennsylvania’s Upper Merion School District. State funding for Pennsylvania public libraries in 2010 will be $68 million, compared to $94 million in 2008, while a “specific portion of state funding” for databases like Power Library fell from $11 million in 2009 to $2.9 million in 2010. Hokanson discussed funding cuts, which she suggests “undermines years of effort to connect all schools to the Internet,” with Rick Wills of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “Much of the good and reliable information on the Web is not available for free. The free Web is so cluttered that you can't find things,” Hokanson said.

That the 2011 federal education budget proposal doesn’t include “any additional funding for school libraries” is another dilemma librarians face this year, according to Buffy J. Hamilton, the Unquiet Librarian. Hamilton is a media specialist/teacher-librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia, who recently blogged about the budget proposal in the form of a letter to President Obama. Instruction of skills like information evaluation and self-filtering “has the most value when taught in the context of the school curriculum and when driven by student’s own inquiry,” Hamilton writes. Thus, cutting funding for school libraries could be catastrophic for students. 


Glenn Miller, the Pennsylvania Library Association’s executive director, summed up what seems to be causing a sense of panic among educators and librarians. “We are talking about dozens of sources of reliable information, vital educational tools that reach tens of thousands of students with little money,” he said, according to Wills.

The challenge then becomes finding free, online resources that are reliable and educational, and that can provide teachers and librarians with an alternative to the expensive databases of years past.

At Dulcinea Media, we’re repositioning our entire company to be one of these alternatives.  The most loyal visitors to our Web sites are librarians, teachers and students in high school and middle school. Thus, a year ago we began to focus our content on these groups.  We presented at two national conferences in the fall and we learned there is a critical need in the school market for free products that promote the effective, safe and responsible use of the Internet, and that ours fit the bill well. Indeed, in a subsequent post, Valenza reviewed our newest product, SweetSearch Biographies, and noted that it “looks especially sweet in these tight database times.” 

It may not be easy for students and educators to transition away from tried-and-true databases, but when students leave the confines of the classroom, they’ll be better equipped to tangle with the mass of information on the Web.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Using the Web to Discover the Early Work of an Artist

Recently, while writing a profile of the great painter Georgia O'Keeffe, I came across a number of interesting details of her life and career. In doing research I learned that in order to have a visual timeline of her career and to keep the prices and demand for her work high, O'Keeffe kept or bought back more than half of all the 2000 or more paintings she created in her lifetime. She also appeared in art exhibitions for which she was not the artist, but the subject; her husband Alfred Stieglitz was an art gallery owner and photographer, and did a series of photographs featuring O'Keeffe (even a few nudes) during their marriage.

Although perhaps most surprising to me was that O'Keeffe did not always paint the forms for which we know her today. The stark white bones contrasting with the desert sky and the colorful over-sized insides of flowers were done in a style that O'Keeffe didn't adopt until she was nearly 40, but those paintings were so overwhelmingly popular that they have somewhat overshadowed her early work.

O'Keeffe's early work was of a more abstract nature. From about 1915 until the mid 1920s, O'Keeffe drew and painted images that expressed a view of the world in stark contrast to the almost photographic paintings of her later years. It was an early series of her charcoal on paper drawings (that were an abstract exploration of line and shape) that first caught the eye of then gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. The Georgia O'Keeffe museum notes that O'Keeffe was ahead of her art colleagues of the time with her interest in abstract work, just as her ultra realistic more famous paintings would show the world another innovative view later on.

One of the great advances in technology over the last decade is the increased availability of online multimedia, such as images and videos. This allows users to not just read about artists, but to experience their work. At the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Web site you can look at examples of her work from different eras in her career, including her abstract period. You would be hard-pressed to encounter many of these pieces in real life.

And if you'd like to visit the work of other well-known artists online, see our article about virtually visiting museums.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Inspired by Zinn, Researching Contrary Viewpoints in History

Michael Dwyer/AP Photo

When Howard Zinn was 17, he got his first taste of rebellion in Times Square. Invited to a political rally by a few budding communists from his Brooklyn neighborhood, Zinn watched as policemen rode in on horseback and began beating protestors. He was hit and fell unconscious.

“I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant,” Zinn said, according to The New York Times.

The incident sparked Zinn, who went on to serve in World War II, to earn a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, and write his famous leftist book, “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn passed away yesterday after suffering a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., where he’d been traveling, The Boston Globe reports.

His seminal work is perhaps Zinn’s most profound contribution to American students and teachers; regardless of your opinion of Zinn’s work, his voracious questioning of the status quo is admirable. And perhaps there is a way for budding young revolutionaries to emulate Zinn’s tenacity, and to muster enough fire to champion causes they believe in, regardless of how vehement the opposition. 

Student inspiration could begin with research, and with uncovering a spark of inspiration, whether a memorable Zinn quote or another contrary viewpoint of history. If you know where to look online, such viewpoints can make for excellent classroom discussion points or research paper topics.

To get an idea of where to begin looking, and how to determine which online sources to take seriously, see findingDulcinea’s On This Day article about Germany’s bombing of the city of Coventry on Nov. 15, 1940. More than 500 people were killed and the city’s cathedral was destroyed in the attack. Notably, some people contend that Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew about the attack, but chose to keep it a secret to preserve an intelligence tool.

FindingDulcinea’s article includes an “Opinion & Analysis” section discussing whether Churchill knew about the bombing of Coventry. The section links to a Time magazine review of  “The Ultra Secret” but F.W. Winterbotham, the first to present a theory of Churchill’s actions. An article by Peter J. McIver, alleging that “Churchill Let Coventry Burn to Protect His Secret Intelligence,” posted on The Churchill Centre and Museum at the Cabinet War Rooms, London, is also included. The piece compares Winterbotham’s book with similar works by Anthony Cave Brown and William Stevenson.

Magazines that maintain comprehensive archives, such as Time, Harper’s and Life, are also good places to begin historical research. The Sweet Search results for "Winston Churchill" also impressive: Fordham University, Encyclopedia Britannica, the National Archives and PBS all appear on the first page of results.

Get more tips in our article on the best “Web Sites for Researching History,” and keep Zinn’s spirit of curiosity alive.

Sarah Amandolare

Senior Writer

Musings on Math

For a long time, I loved math. In sixth grade I joined Mathletes, played the “whadyouget” game after every test, and my favorite part of my day—aside from recess—involved sitting in a group rolling a die and playing some obscure game where you added, subtracted and multiplied.As a freshman in high school, I helped with the measurements when we built what we hoped would be the world’s largest Icosahedron. We made a T-shirt of the blueprint. I wore it.

Today, however, I place myself squarely in the camp of women who’d say they aren’t good at math. Naturally, I was fascinated by a study saying that elementary girls scored lower on math tests after spending a school year with female teachers that were anxious about math.

Now, I know that a single case can’t negate a study and that’s not what I’m arguing. I don’t remember which teachers taught me math in elementary school or even if they were good teachers. It’s possible that they were nervous or uninspired. But the math teachers that I do remember were all women and they were, for the most part, bright, fun, confident women who LOVED math, and wanted to share that passion.

Still, at some point in high school, I started to believe that I wasn’t good at math. And while I don’t blame my teachers—though my freshman year teacher was by far the best—I do hold our society somewhat responsible. I know, blame society. That’s like blaming oxygen. But it’s true. Girls are taught that they excel at language and writing, while boys excel at math and science.  And even though statistics have begun to disprove this idea, the truth never came fast enough for some of us. At some point, like a lot of women I know, the thought that I would never be good at math wormed its way into some cranny in my brain, embedded itself, and then decomposed, bits of itself living on beneath the surface.

So, what happens when you don’t believe you’re good at something? You stop trying. And you’re never going to be good at something if you don’t practice at it. Ask Michael Jordan. Ask Norah Jones.

I chose another path. I became fascinated with language, enamored with books, and authors—all of it. That became my thing and I don’t regret it. But who says you can’t have more than one thing.  Teachers, encourage your students, all of them. If you're weak in a subject, practice. Get help. And don't ever let them think, it's because you're a woman.

Shannon Firth
Senior Writer and Audience Development Coordinator

Martin Luther King and the Perils of a Google Search

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a day when many people are looking up information on the Civil Rights leader. Unfortunately, relying on Google or other popular search engines can lead unsuspecting researchers astray.

A Google search for “Martin Luther King” brings up martinlutherking.org as its third result. The site, which claims to give a “True Historical Examination” of King’s life, makes many false or misleading accusations intended to discredit King. It encourages students to print flyers and post them in their schools.

The site is designed to resemble a trustworthy educational site. Only a link at the bottom of the front page reveals the source of the site: Stormfront.org, one of the longest-running and most popular white supremacist sites on the Web.

“Because many people use simple Internet keyword searches for instant results, it's easy to see how MartinLutherKing.org, could mislead a user about the nature of its content,” writes Imaeyen Ibanga for ABC News.

Martinlutherking.org is an extreme example of the importance of evaluating a Web site’s credibility. One cannot assume that the first few results of a Google search are credible Web sites. A site’s Google ranking is due more to its traffic and keyword optimization than the quality of its content.

When evaluating a Web site you are not familiar with, it is necessary to look at the “About Us” section or similar section. For help in evaluating credibility, see our Guide to Web Search.

Google’s results also demonstrate the advantages of Sweet Search, which includes only Web sites that have been evaluated as reliable and appropriate for educational purposes.

Read the findingDulcinea profile of Martin Luther King Jr. to find the best Web sites for studying his life and work.