findingDulcinea

A relaunch of SweetSearch - and versions for News and History too!

Since 2009, SweetSearch has been the best place for students - and anyone else - to begin research.

It leverages Google to search only a fully vetted "whitelist" of websites. The original index was created by 50+ librarians, educators and researchers who collectively invested over 100,000 hours in finding the best resources.

We've worked hard to keep the index authoritative and appropriate.  This summer, we reviewed every link in the index, and found new, worthy websites we had missed.

 

Add a fresh, mobile friendly look and we say confidently that SweetSearch is the best research engine for students to begin their search. Some educators have asked us about the Google Ads at the top; we are working on options to remove them. For now, tell students to ignore the clearly labeled, first few links at the top and then dive into the spectacular results below. 

Once we made SweetSearch better than ever, we decided to make more of it! 

• SweetSearch History, in beta, searches a whitelist of 2,000+ primary source & other authoritative history websites. It includes "modern" sources, such as newspapers and magazines, but weights websites of museums, universities and official government sources higher.  We are adding design elements and "field testing" it - and we would love your feedback on whether there are websites we should add, delete, or re-weight. 
• With all the talk of "fake news," we also created SweetSearch News. It searches 1,600+ websites of credible newspapers, magazines and other current events media. It more heavily weights niche, regional and ex-US resources than most news search engines. There is an option to see only ex-US resource
• For the first time, we also offer image search, in all three search engines.

All of our search engines include quality websites for younger students; to find them, use "students" or "kids" as a keyword.

Email Mark[dot]Moran[at]DulcineaMedia.com with any comments.

Thank you for your support!

Mark, CEO, Dulcinea Media

 

 

Can one course stem the root cause of bullying, substance abuse and self-harm? Can it also foster a culture that creates empowered, empathetic, collaborative, passionate agents of change, who know they matter?

I was proud to co-author, with Angela Maiers, an online course on Choose2Matter. It's the most important work I've ever done.

findingDulcinea and LineTime Partner on History Timeline App

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

Why SweetSearch Is the Best Search Engine for Students

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated as credible by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants.

SweetSearch searches a "whitelist" comprised only of these 35,000 links, as well as sites we uncover by sifting through recommendations of librarians and teachers on their blogs and social bookmarking sites. You know those great lists you've been bookmarking for years? Well, SweetSearch is a giant, searchable repository of them.

It's likely that, had we sat down at the beginning to find a list of 35,000 credible sites, we would not have done it nearly as well as we did by instead finding, evaluating, organizing and annotating hundreds of Web Guides to the best 25-75 sites about a particular subject, or the best 5-8 sources about thousands of events in history, famous people, or timeless news topics.

We constantly evaluate the search results in SweetSearch and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and universities. We do more than merely exclude spam sites; we also exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not cite worthy.

For a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch from top educators, see our media kit; to add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch; or get a widget for SweetSearch, to  embed it on your school Web site.

For younger learners, we've recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites.

(Please note that SweetSearch4Me is the only variant search engine; our landing pages for School Librarians, Social Studies Teachers, Biographies, etc. do not contain their own versions of SweetSearch; they all highlight particular content from findingDulcinea and other sites that are useful to the target group, but the search engine included is the original version of SweetSearch).

Technology journalist Paul Gilster wrote in his column in The News Observer, "Search here and you're working in a universe of checked, verifiable sources and solid information.....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."

Our favorite review came from an impressive member of our target audience - Amanda, who blogs as "Farmgirl Writes," and deemed SweetSearch "an amazing search engine," and explained,

"Within a half-an-hour, I was ready to type my essay, wondering why I'd wasted a half a day searching with Google and EBSCOhost. (Sorry Google. I still love you - just not for research anymore.) Why didn't I discover this before? If I had known about Sweet Search at the beginning of World History, I think I would have saved myself hundreds of hours of research."

Many articles that may be 3, 5, or 10 years old - but are still the most authoritative writing on the subject - are treated as stale by other search engines, and yet appear on the first page of SweetSearch results.  And to most students, the first page is the only one that exists. 

 The result? As Amanda wrote, students find what they need, and they find it faster. When my generation was in school, the librarian pointed us to pre-screened resources on our general subject, and we decided which ones were the most relevant to our specific research project. That’s what SweetSearch does for students with online resources. 

To enable students to better scan results to determine relevancy, we've partnered with Yolink. From a SweetSearch results page, click on the Yolink toolbar on the left side, and add a term to narrow your search. Yolink will then browse your original search results and show an expanded view of the results in which your additional term appears. Yolink then enables you to save excerpts of search results, with the source link, to a Google doc, Web-based email, or social bookmarking and sharing services such as Diigo, and to the citation generator Easy Bib.

Together, SweetSearch, Yolink and EasyBib are utterly transforming Web search for students, from something they can barely use to something they can use quite effectively.

 Of course, students still need to follow the principles laid out in our Ten Steps to Better Web Research by, among other things, formulating good search queries, and often looking past the first few results to find the very best ones. Another principle is to use more than one search engine, as not even we use SweetSearch exclusively - when we research an article, we start with SweetSearch and usually find substantially all we need there, but then we always cross-check against other search engines and databases, and so should your students. To facilitate this, SweetSearch includes a toggle option to view the search results from Google. 

But enough of the "press release."  Let's take SweetSearch for a test-drive. We'll compare the results for "War of 1812" on SweetSearch, Google and Bing.

Many of the results returned by Google and Bing aren't quite up to snuff for including in a school paper. Wikipedia ranks first on both engines. While many people find Wikipedia a good place to begin their research, most educators are frustrated that students use it almost exclusively, and not wisely.  For this reason, Wikipedia almost never shows up in SweetSearch results.

For "War of 1812," the second result on Google is "Gateway New Orleans," which includes a brief summary of the war by an unknown author. The purpose of the site is to promote tourism in New Orleans, not to promote scholarship on the War of 1812. And both search engines prominently display a link that contains a teaser summary of the war by Gala Films, whose purpose is to get you to buy a movie.

Both of these sites rank so high because general commercial search engines display recently published content high in its results, since many times that is what the user finds most relevant. But when it comes to a war that ended nearly two centuries ago, recently produced material has little advantage over the “classics.” 

Both search engines also prominently feature "Warof1812.ca," and "Warof1812.net," likely because of the specificity of their domain names. The first offers a lot of material written by two people, whose credentials are not provided. The site contains no "About Us" section, and its primary purpose is to sell products relating to the war. The second is the result of a long-abandoned project to put student material on the Internet; it's primary purpose now seems to be to drive you to search the topic yourself on Google.

On the first page of SweetSearch's results, you'll find precisely the Web sites that a teacher wants students using. The first result is the Library of Congress' entire collection of primary source documents on the War of 1812. The second is a comprehensive ThinkQuest created by students under the supervision of teachers and professors, followed by sites from the National Archives and the U.S. Military.  Four sites in the next group—an Indiana University site about the political cartoons of the War of 1812, a Long Island University site about African-American Freedom Fighters, a Smithsonian site about the Star Spangled Banner, and the Avalon Project of Yale University—are sites that students could use to solidly distinguish their work from that of their classmates. Where are these results on Google and Bing? Scattered through the third to seventh results pages.

Now let's do a comparison for "Shakespeare" in SweetSearch, Google and Bing.

Again, Wikipedia ranks first for Google and Bing. Also appearing prominently, again due to the specific domain names, are "Shakespeare.com" and "Shakespeare-online.com." Each of these is a well-written "passion site," one created by an individual who is passionate about the subject, but does not possess academic credentials that would enable a student to rely on the sites when writing an academic paper. Each engine also contains several sites that are only about selling products.

On SweetSearch, you again find some outstanding academic resources, many of which are buried in Google or Bing. These include sites from the Library of Congress, the British Library, PBS and Project Gutenberg.

We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by commenting below or by e-mailing us at Mark[dot]Moran[at]DulcineaMedia[dot]com

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

 

Materials for Presentation at LISMA, Sept 29, 2010

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

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

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

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

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

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

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

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

Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students

Transforming Web Research for Students

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

            Click here for widgets for SweetSearch and our other products.

Educators Will Create the Replacement for Textbooks

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET IN SCHOOL

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

Things that Keep Us Up at Night

Younger Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

Angela Maiers: Learning Now

A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

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

Dalton Sherman, Dallas ISD

SweetSearch School Librarians

TEACHING TEN STEPS TO BETTER WEB RESEARCH

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

CONTACT INFO

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

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

"Like" SweetSearch on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

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

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

 

Introducing the On This Day Challenge

Today marks the official launch of findingDulcinea's brand new tool, findingEducation. It's an online resource that allows teachers and students to save and share their favorite Web sites, as well as post and share assignments with the findingEducation community. It's up and running now in alpha mode, and we'd love for you to sign up and take a look around.

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

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more. Learn about the mission behind findingEducation and the On This Day Challenge by reading our founder Mark Moran's message to the findingEducation community.

We'll be working toward building a community of teachers and students (and a collection of amazing Web resources) on findingEducation over the coming weeks and months, and would appreciate it if you'd spread the word. Sign up and tell your friends, whether they're teachers or parents, or just need a reminder of how much fun learning can be!

Who Wants to Be an Internet Expert?

Back in the olden days, people talked about the list of books they wanted to read but would probably never get to. Although the lists might have been long, they may have been more manageable than we realized. With the Web, we’re getting a seemingly infinite number of articles thrown at us every minute. It’s hard to make a reading list—never mind get through it.

Fortunately, findingDulcinea, your friendly, neighborhood Internet librarian, has a solution: Our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters. Or, as we like to think of them: Expertise in Your Inbox.

* The Daily Dulcinea: A dose of knowledge spotlighting a notable biography or historical event. On Saturday, we'll send you "5 Must-Reads You May Have Missed" during the week.
* Weekly Travel Newsletter: a virtual tour of under-the-radar vacation destinations.
* Weekly Education Newsletter: a curation of Web sites and tools that aim to empower teachers, librarians, parents and students.
* Sweet Sites: a weekly e-mail of Web sites that will aid your research, up your Internet savvy and expand your mind.

Sign up here, now!

Your desire to become an Internet expert is probably reason enough for you to sign up for one or all of these newsletters. But if you need more incentive, we've created a list of reasons:

1. Our "On This Day" and Happy Birthday e-mails are guaranteed to tell you the correct date, every day.
2. There's no point to that new smartphone if no one is e-mailing you, right? We'll e-mail you. We promise.
3. We are more consistent/less demanding than the boy/girl/client/gig you wish was e-mailing you.
4. Getting our travel newsletter is like traveling, except you can bring more than 3 fluid ounces with you when you read it.
5. Our weekly "Sweet Sites" e-mail is not as bad for your teeth as other sweets. Nor will it get your keyboard sticky when you surf the Web.
6. If you lie and say you found one of our Sweet Sites yourself, we'll never find out.
7. Visit our Religion and Spirituality Web Guide to deal with the guilt you'll feel about stealing credit for our awesome work.

Earth Day 2009: Blogging from Earth

Globes from an exhibit called "Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet" at the Rose Garden at Exposition Park in Los Angeles,Tuesday, April 21, 2009. (Photo: Reed Saxon/AP)

Visit our new section, The Environment, for news stories and features on food and farming; environmental threats; global environmental news; green living guides; wildlife news and more.

Our environmental coverage on the findingDulcinea blog has been varied: we’ve evaluated disaster-relief sites, given you the scoop on eco-cleaning products and divulged our favorite green city guides. Below, we’ve rounded up a few Earth Day-inspired posts for your web surfing pleasure.

Disaster Tracking

Research centers located around the world are dedicated to monitoring the violent storms that seem to be constantly discussed by news networks. Whether you’re concerned about floods, volcanoes, earthquakes or tornadoes, the research center Web sites in this "Sweet Sites" post on emergency preparedness will keep you in-the-know.

Traveling Green

Last fall, we introduced you to two fun and informative travel sites with an environmental slant. The green city guides are particularly helpful, explaining, for instance, where to walk and view great architecture in Chicago, and how to keep it green in Christchurch. Head over to our post on Green City Guides for further details and chosen links.

The Great Green Clean

If you’re a clean freak but hate the chemical smell associated with most home cleaning products, read our post on Green Cleaning. We culled information and tips on keeping a tidy home sans noxious odors and toxins, and linked to our favorite sources on everything from dish soap to laundry detergent.

An Arctic Following

With Arctic ice rapidly disappearing and dire predictions made by some researchers, you might be wondering what the true story is up north. To narrow things down and gain perspective, read our post on Monitoring the Arctic, where we’ve linked to organizations and online libraries to aid your researching efforts.

Sarah Amandolare
Senior Writer

Yom Hashoah: Struggling to Remember

The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/AP)

A phrase frequently associated with the Holocaust is “Never Forget.” It’s become more poignant as the majority of the survivors of those terrible times are now no longer with us. While we may eventually gain some intellectual understanding of the events, emotionally engaging with such a monstrous event is difficult without some kind of personal connection.

As the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I can claim a certain personal connection. I am deeply aware of how improbable it is that I even exist. My mother is a Hungarian-American Jew who was born in Budapest in 1944. During her infancy, my grandfather was in a camp, and my grandmother sought safety and shelter for herself and my mother in various safe houses established by the Red Cross and by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

Of course, my mother has no memory of those days, and sadly, my brave grandmother died shortly after I was born. My grandfather survived the camps, and when I was a teenager, he tried to share some of his experiences with me. He died about 10 years ago, and now those memories are lost, too. My grandfather’s one surviving friend (who herself was dramatically saved by Raoul Wallenberg’s intervention) is in her 90s.

Soon, there will be no one left to share a first-person account, and so much has already been forgotten. All we will have is the historical record and the mass of personal narratives left behind by those who could serve as witnesses. As the Holocaust recedes into the past, we must do what we can to continue to make it real, to understand how genocide occurs and to learn how we can stop atrocities occurring today and in the future.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Congress has officially set aside the entire week of April 19 to remember the events of the Holocaust. FindingDulcinea has created a Web page of resources to help you learn and share information about the Holocaust. Forge your own connection, however tenuous it may be. Help make sure we will not forget.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

Introducing SweetSearch, a More Selective Search Engine

Today, findingDulcinea launched a more selective search engine. Its name is SweetSearch, and it’s just what I’ve been waiting for.

SweetSearch gives me great search results right on the first page. I don’t have to waste time scrolling through a lot of junk returns to find what I really want. And it often gives me a “eureka” find—a site I never would have encountered using another search engine.

For students of any level, and for anyone doing research online, SweetSearch avoids the confusing and often unreliable listings that can appear high up on a typical search engine’s results page.

SweetSearch is the offshoot of three years of research by findingDulcinea’s staff—an ever-growing collection of tens of thousands of Web sites, all evaluated and approved for reliability and ease of use. FindingDulcinea’s researchers use multiple search engines and databases to uncover many sites that don't routinely appear in the search engines most people use (Google, Yahoo! and MSN).

With Google's Custom Search service as its foundation, SweetSearch indexes only those approved sites—the results are fine-tuned, focused and discriminating. Users find more of what they really want, and they get to it faster.

SweetSearch also includes a toggle option to view results from Google as a supplement to your search queries on SweetSearch.

Watch these videos produced by Senior Writer Rachel Balik, as she compares two searches conducted on SweetSearch and Google:

A comparison search of 'Gardasil'

A comparison search of 'Benjamin Franklin'

We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by commenting below or by e-mailing sweetsearch (at) dulcineamedia (dot) com.

For more information on SweetSearch, read the press release.

Anne Kostick
Editor-in-Chief

The New News Format

Hello. I’m a long-time findingDulcinea writer, and first-time blogger here. As for yourselves, if you’re long-time findingDulcinea readers, I’m sure you’ve noticed a new format in our news section, Beyond the Headlines. Beginning in early August, the bulk of our news stories now read more like feature pieces often found in “old media” news sources. In keeping with our “Librarian of the Internet” motto, findingDulcinea’s new format includes hyperlinks directly to the best sources on the news topics we cover, offering better readability and utility for you—as well as more enjoyable writing for the news staff.

Take the story I did last week on “pump and dump” stocks, for example. The article starts out with a synopsis of recent developments regarding spammers who hype up penny stocks to scam unwitting investors. The format allows us to compile the key facts on a given story in a more streamlined manner, rather than separating details on a given topic by link description, as with our older style.

This way, readers in a time bind can just read the lede paragraph to get the gist of a story, then scroll down to the background and reference sections to learn about “pumping and dumping” and “penny stocks,” so readers don’t have to Google the phrases to feel in the know, saving time. The article is linked to our Web Guide to Finance, helpful for novice investors as well as Wall Street moguls.

The new format benefits me as well. As findingDulcinea’s financial beat writer, I feel it is my duty to sift out the jargon of which other publications’ business stories are so often laden. Business, economic and financial news are quite arguably the stories that affect our daily lives the most. While Brangelina and Tomkat offer escapism to housewives and harried professionals alike, when it comes to household bills, the likelihood of recessions or Indonesia’s dropping out of OPEC are a tad bit, if not entirely, more relevant.

But their dry tone and heavy use of acronyms such as EBITDA (earnings before tax, interest, depreciation and amortization—say that five times fast), or PR-ish terms such as “launched a mega-project” tend to send most people flocking to the “Molasses Truck Dumps on Sugar Land” stories of the world—not that I don’t mind those—hint, hint.

So in addition to filtering out Internet clutter, our new news format takes wonkish terminology out of business reporting—bringing you one step closer to finding your “financial Dulcinea” instead of using the business section of a newspaper as packing material. As you read about the possible causes behind the downfall of AIG or the Mortgage Macs, I hope you will be as moved to learn about the financial markets as this econ geekette is to write about them.

Anne Szustek
Senior Writer

FindingDulcinea Fan Poetry

The first ever poem about findingDulcinea has been published. The Web Laureate found us via a nice review written by Mashable. A poem on the Web Laureate blog soon followed.

"My Quest"

My librarian,
Yes, all’s mine,
Sitting over there,
Reading, definitely wise.

My librarian,
Who helps me,
Finding — I need found,
Showing, just what I seek.

My librarian,
A wave - I shout "Yahoo!"
Hearkens to days of past,
Organized, structured too.

My librarian,
Clearly, new around here,
Finding and sharing each,
Dulcinea, my sweet love, I beg, I do beseech.

Read more poems from The Web Laureate.

Partnership with El Especial

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

Getting to Know Us

We are working on sprucing up our info pages on findingDulcinea. We have a new site tour, along with a video. Coming soon, we'll have biographies for all of our employees with fancy photos and a list of our favorite Web sites.

Google News

You can now read findingDulcinea Beyond the Headlines on Google News. Our BTH stories provide background and context to news headlines, including historical, academic and local perspectives. So now you can get all of that information along side the stories from The New York Times, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and the other top news sources.

Katie Hartsough
Audience Development