findingDulcinea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should come next?

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

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

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

Indeed, what comes after textbooks should be something created to leverage the wisdom of a crowd of educators who, in the words of John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter (Iowa) Schools, collectively decide that no one should have "ownership" over what is taught in schools.

How can educators collaboratively develop a tool that solves all of these problems?

For many years now, a rapidly growing number of innovative educators around the world have been using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. They are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. This information is the virtual version of a "course pack" of articles that many college professors curate for students.

These teachers are also creating lesson plans and assignments that test students' critical thinking and relevant communication skills, rather than prepare them to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. They teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life.

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

What is needed is a single, central repository that aggregates the work of great educators and makes it easily searchable. Teachers should be able to access assignments created by other teachers, learn from them, build on them, and then contribute their own, improved versions to the repository. For example, once a few dozen U.S. History teachers create innovative, resource-rich assignments relating to the U.S Civil War, a new teacher entering the fray can synthesize the best of the existing lesson plans to create his or her own.

To put a smiley face on a despised term, it would create a "Race to the Top," but one unburdened by federal oversight.

We’ve created a prototype of such a repository, called findingEducation (a name unlikely to endure). It's in Alpha stage, but in its current form, it has several useful features:

• Its back-end helps includes selective tools that help educators find the best online resources about any subject – the first critical step in educators creating OER;
• Its “My Library” enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, which can be viewed by other educators;
• Educators than share the links with students on a blog-like assignment page, called a “digital classroom.”  All of the content on this platform is chosen by educators;
• Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, and yet remains on the central repository so that it is easily discoverable by other educators;
• Educators must be permitted to make use of each other’s work, without restriction;
• For findingEducation, or any other tool, to replace textbooks, it needs a critical mass of educators from one subject using it regularly; we’ve had advanced conversations with a group of educators who may help us attract 2,000-5,000 other educators to begin using the platform; and
  
• While we likely won't be able to offer the platform free of cost forever, we don't envision charging more than $20 per user per year.
  

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

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

For more information on findingEducation:

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

Take our site tour.

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

For more information or to contact us with inquiries, comments or feedback, e-mail [email protected] or write me directly at [email protected]

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

A Search Engine for Educators

Three years ago, we introduced SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It is a bold concept – a human curated search engine that searches only Web sites that have been evaluated by research experts. We didn’t apply an algorithm or a filter – we created a whitelist of 35,000 Websites. Reviewers have uniformly praised SweetSearch as an outstanding tool for students.

After we launched, we learned of another group of people that may actually appreciate SweetSearch even more – educators. We continually monitor Twitter and education list serves to learn about the specific search needs of educators, and to make sure we meet those needs. The response has been gratifying:

 

See many more Tweets by educators about SweetSearch.

Teachers are learning that if they search in our reliable universe of sites, they can quickly build their lesson plans, find blogs and advice from fellow educators, and discover primary resources, which are hard to locate using the internal search function of sites such as The Library of Congress or National Archives.

To see typical results for yourself, take a look at the results for these representative terms, then compare them to the results of Google and Bing:

Holocaust

Differentiated Instruction

War of 1812

Shakespeare Sonnets

World War II

 You'll likely find, as Paul Gilster, a technology journalist, wrote in the News Observer about SweetSearch: “Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality....I was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials.”

SweetSearch has integrated Yolink, a tool that highlights keywords, showing where the term is used and in what context, so that anyone can quickly scan a search results page and easily determine which results will be most helpful for a particular task. See how quickly you can evaluate the full first page of 20 results! The search terms and surrounding context can then be saved, with one click, to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib's citation generator, or a social bookmarking service. So you not only can find what you’re looking for in seconds, but you can be sharing it with colleagues moments later.

For Open Education Resource platforms to succeed, they need to be as easy for educators to use as possible. It's not enough to give educators a long, aggregated list of relevant resources of varying quality; the resources need to be expertly curated, and there must be a function for educators to search within these resources.

That is what SweetSearch provides, at no cost.

 

  

 

 

Mark Moran

CEO

Today is National Grammar Day (and Twitter is No Excuse!)

Get this picture on a t-shirt at Allfavourites.com.

You can fire off a three-paragraph e-mail in one minute and condense a day’s worth of thoughts into a few 140-character tweets.

But how’s your grammar?

Modes of communication like e-mail, instant messaging, texting and Twitter are changing a lot of things, like the way we get information, how we consume it and most importantly on National Grammar Day, how we compose it.

Today is a chance to treat every utterance like it can’t be spell-checked by Microsoft Word.

 The official site of National Grammar Day has a simple message for all those who want to “get involved” in the celebration: “Speak well! Write well! And on March 4, march forth and spread the word. We want people to think about language and how it can be used best.”

One way you can “march forth” is by challenging yourself with the University of California Press’s copy editing quiz. You may feel like you’re back in the classroom where you first took the SAT. But even if you get the answers wrong, you’ll get an explanation of the right answers.

Also, read our article on the decline of grammar, in "What's Happening to Writing Skills?"

Grammar Girl hosts podcasts about common grammar and usage mistakes. Confused about “which” and “that”? “Between” vs. “among”? Need proofreading tips? These and more topics are covered in a format that’ll give you a nice break from screen-based reading.

Refer back to a good, old-fashioned book, “The Elements of Style,” for trustworthy tips and explanations.

Finally, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar publishes this blog in which it members "document their noble efforts."

Check out our Web Guides to Elementary School English and Middle School English for links to some quality sites and tips on English that you can impart to the young people you know.

Liz Colville

What Will Take the Place of Textbooks in the Social Studies Curriculum?

For many years, educators and other observers have forecast the death of the textbook.

Yet when Apple introduced iBooks two weeks ago, it was met with great fanfare in parts of the education community.  Several major textbook publishers signed on as initial customers.

It’s no surprise that these companies eagerly signed on to a “solution” that largely preserves the status quo. The iBooks, for all their bells and whistles, still have one fatal flaw: they are still textbooks. They are a case, in the words of Pete Townsend, of “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.”

As education professor Alec Couros Tweeted last week, “as long as there are textbooks of any sort, there will be no reform.”

What will it take to bring about the death of the textbook?

What comes next must be created by 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.

iBooks fall far short of this ideal:

• iBooks are created by education companies that are susceptible to politically driven agendas. This is a phenomenon that has been around long before the 2010 Texas controversy.

• iBooks reflect the perspective of a small number of writers and editors, rather than the collective wisdom of experienced educators.
• Like  conventional textbooks, iBooks are geared towards requiring students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, rather than encouraging them to explore the full range of a topic on their own, think for themselves, and form their own perspectives.

• iBooks largely impose a textbook's "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs;

• iBooks will not reduce the $8 to $15 billion the U.S. education system spends on text books each year.  iPads are required to read them, and, given the large file size for each textbook, students will likely need the 32GB iPad, which currently retails for $699; furthermore, the $15 textbook is not transferable from one student to another, and thus the cost is the same as a $75 textbook that lasts five years.

How can educators collaboratively develop a tool that solves all of these problems?

For many years now, a rapidly growing number of innovative educators around the world have been using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. They are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. This information is the virtual version of a "course pack" of articles that many college professors curate for students.

What is needed is a single, central repository that aggregates the work of these educators and makes it easily searchable. Teachers would be able to access assignments created by other teachers, learn from them, build on them, and then contribute their own, improved versions to the repository. 

To put a smiley face on a despised term, it would create a "Race to the Top" unburdened by federal oversight.

We’ve created a prototype of such a repository, called findingEducation (a name unlikely to endure). It's in Alpha stage, but in its current form, it has several useful features:

• Its back-end helps includes selective tools that help educators easily find the best online resources about any subject.
• Its “My Library” enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, which can be viewed by other educators;
•  Educators than share the links with students on a blog-like assignment page, called a “digital classroom.”
• Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website.
• For findingEducation, or any other tool, to replace textbooks, it needs a critical mass of educators from one subject using it regularly. Educators must be permitted to make use of each other’s work, without restriction.

For example, once a few dozen U.S. History teachers create innovative, resource-rich assignments relating to the U.S Civil War, a new teacher entering the fray can synthesize the best of the existing lesson plans to create his or her own.

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

For more information on findingEducation:

Take a site tour.

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

ThingLink enables you to tag and link images in your website or blog

We've spent some time recently with the creative team behind ThingLink.

ThingLink is a free, very easy-to-use tool that enables you to tag an image and add up to 1,500 characters of text about the image, and include a link, in the tag. The link can be to any file on the web, including text, video or audio.

Below is an example in which a human skeleton is tagged with Wikipedia entries describing the major parts of the skeleton.

ThingLink will be quite useful for student project in which the student creates and tags a timeline of photos, with a few links on each one.

We write often of the imperative to teach students "ways to communicate their ideas in a manner that engages modern audiences." ThingLink is one such way.

I am eager to see the ingenious ways in which students learn to use this tool.

 

How Dulcinea Media Helps School Librarians Serve Teachers & Students

At Dulcinea Media, we view school librarians as our best allies in helping us fulfill our mission to help students learn how to use the web effectively.

We've attended the past two AASL shows and many local library conferences, and we've spent plenty of time visiting schools and monitoring LM_Net to learn how we can help librarians help teachers and students. We've also become one of the most ardent advocates for school librarians in the face of clueless school boards that want to cut their positions.

Click here to read reviews of our work. Perhaps the kindest words in the many reviews of our products come from Temple University Professor Renee Hobbs, who wrote to us, "your website is such a treasure trove of fascinating stuff! I want every educator in America to know about it."

We agree with that aim! To that end, here is a brief discussion of our products and how they help school librarians serve:

1. In April 2012, we'll be releasing our Web Research Tutorial; it is the only product for which we will charge a fee, and a modest one at that. Based on research studies and the result of extensive interviews, it will teach web research skills to educators and students in a way that no other product does. Using a multimedia, varied format, it meets them where they are and uses pragmatic analogies and examples to bring them along to where they need to be.

2. SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students, is a free tool that helps educators and students find credible, comprehensive resources about their subject, quickly (BONUS: librarians and teachers tell us it helps them find awesome resources as well!  We use it to respond to librarian queries on LM_Net and often find the requested info in seconds). SweetSearch searches only 35,000 websites that research experts have approved, and it does not contain offensive ads! We've also introduced SweetSearch4Me, the only search engine that prominently features on the first results page the high quality Web sites created for elementary school students. READ MORE.

We offer a widget for both SweetSearch and SweetSearch4Me, so you can embed them on your school Web sites. But the best way to get your students to use these superior tools is to add them on to every browser in your school; to do this for Firefox and Internet Explorer, just click the green Add-On box on the top right of SweetSearch.

3. Do your students write about the same events and people, year after year? 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.

4. Access our landing page for Social Studies  In the left column, you'll find dozen of Web Guides that are comprehensive, narrated tours of the best content on the Web about the subject, that directly link to the best primary sources about a subject. We have hundreds of other web guides as well. For librarians, we offer Sweet Sites, a distilled version of our education Web Guides, divided into teacher and student pages for high school, middle school and elementary school. Feel free to link to these pages, or even copy the links you like onto your own library Web site.

The social studies page includes our seminal article, "101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class," that points teachers and students to a trove of great sites, organized by topic. You'll also find on this page links to articles that curate the best online resources, such as "Sites for Learning About Countries," "Sites for Learning About the 50 States," "9 Sites to find Interesting Interviews," and our Innovations series.

5. Our  On This Day articles 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've recently partnered with The New York Times to combine our respective On This Day products into "Historic Headlines," which relates historic events to today's world.

6. The many presentations we create each year are posted on Slideshare. The presentations explain, among other things, why so many websites restrict users under 13 and what you can do about it, and how to understand CIPA to fight overly restrictive Internet filters.

7. We've written thousands of headline articles in our "Beyond the Headlines" Section; 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.

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."

Some examples of where we addressed the context deficit in a headline story:

• after the death of Osama Bin Laden, social media was clogged with the rampant use of poorly cited or fake quotes online. Many noted the problem, but none suggested ways to address it. Thus we wrote "Misquotes: Searching for Authenticity Online," which teaches students how to verify quotes.
• Because we know schools struggle with how students can use Wikipedia effectively, we wrote, "The Top 10 Reasons Students Can't Cite Wikipedia."
• When Iran violently suppressed protests last year, we provided context by writing 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.

8. We know your hectic schedule doesn't have always a slot that says "visit findingDulcinea." So we come to you! Our free e-mail newsletter arrives at your inbox with an overview of On This Day and our Happy Birthday biography feature, as well as links to our best education articles.

Ask your students to become a fan of findingDulcinea on Facebook, and we'll occasionally interrupt their "urgent" status updates with some inspiring and educational content.

Please also follow us on Twitter  @findingDulcinea

Help us help you. Please send me feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. on our content and tools, to [email protected].

We’d love to hear from you!

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

Best Practices for Integrating the Internet & Technology into the Social Studies Curriculum

 

On Thursday, December 1, 2011, I made a presentation titled "Best Practices for Integrating the Internet and Technology into the Social Studies Curriculum" at the 2011 Annual Conference of the National Social Studies Supervisors Association ("NSSSA).

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

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

 

BEST PRACTICES FOR INTEGRATING THE INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY INTO THE SOCIAL STUDIES CURRICULUM

The printed description of this presentation:

The workshop will be a presentation of Internet and technology resources that enhance the learning of social studies, and inspiring examples of educators who are effectively integrating the Internet and technology into social studies classes.

This presentation is a PowerPoint that is available on SlideShare by Clicking Here.

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

 

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

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

SweetSearch Page for Social Studies

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

Teaching Students the Fragile Truth of History

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

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

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

CONTACT INFO

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

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

 

SOURCES IN PRESENTATION (WITH TWITTER HANDLES):

Dulcinea Media Intro (see links above)

Learning from Your Peers

Peter Pappas - Taxonomy of Reflection / @edteck

SSChat Ning

EdChat

EdCamp SS

Twitter - #SSCHAT

Twitter list of social studies resources (you can see the latest posts from this curated list of resources without even joining Twitter; just click this link from time-to-time.

Teach Paperless / @teachpaperless

History Tech / @glennw98

The Primary Resource Librarian / @johnsonmaryj

History Teacher's Attic and Ted Talks Demystified

 

Ideas for Lesson Plans

Teachinghistory / @teachinghistory

History Matters

PBS Learning Media / @PBSLrnMedia 

EDSITEment! / @edsitement

DocsTeach

Digital Docs in a Box

Teaching High School Psychology / @highschoolpsych

 

Primary Sources on the Web

101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class

Library of Congress Primary Source Sets

American Rhetoric

Miller Center - American Presidents

Miller Center - Address from the Brandenburg Gate

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

Soldier Studies - Database of letters & diaries from Civil War soldiers

Teddy Roosevelt Diary

HarpWeek

Living Room Candidate - Jackie Kennedy

Interview of the Day - Amelia Earhart

Rudyard Kipling Interview with Mark Twain

The Mike Wallace Interview - Orval Faubus

American Presidency Project - Fireside Chats

 

Historic Newspapers and Magazines and Newsreels

NY Times Archive Search

Time Magazine Archive

Topics in Chronicling America

Rag Linen

British Pathe

Sports Illustrated Vault - A Case of Conscience

 

Photographs

Museum Syndicate

Library of Congress American Memory

V-J Day Kiss

Picturing America

Life.com - Photo of RFK

 

Global Resources

World Digital Library

Institute of Historical Research

Primary Access - a suite of free online tools that allows students and teachers to use primary source documents to complete meaningful and compelling learning activities with digital movies, storyboards, rebus stories and other online tools.

 Primary Sources at Yale

 

Timelines

BBC British History Timeline

YTTM

LineTime World History Timeline

 

Students as Creators on the Web

On This Day Challenge

Speaking of History - Making Common Craft Videos in Classroom

ThingLink

Life - Make Your Own Timelines

WallWisher

 

Students as Active Learners and Global Citizens

Sites for Learning About Countries

Chat The Planet - Activism

Making Connections: A Little Soda Pop Story

Skype

ePals

Flat Classroom

Educators That Rock: Bill Reilly

Red Hand Day

The Memory Project: A Portrait of Kindness

 

Games, Simulations

History Animated (animations of historic battles)

 The Doolittle Raid

Games For Change Third World Farmer

 

 

Materials for "No Assembly Required" Presentation at Edscape Conference

On Saturday, October 15, 2011, I am making a presentation titled "No Assembly Required" at the Edscape Conference at New Milford (NJ) High School.

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

I provide full contact info and information about Dulcinea Media at the end.

NO ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

The printed description of this presentation:

"A discussion of principles that should guide education companies, principals, curriculum specialists, department heads, library media specialists and progressive colleagues as they support classroom teachers who would like to embrace online content, relevant technology and a student-centered teaching style.

To launch the discussion, the presenter will discuss his experience in creating products for Dulcinea Media, whose mission is to help educators teach students how to use the Internet effectively, and the principles that guide current development."

This presentation is a PowerPoint that is available on SlideShare.

The links contained in it are repeated below for your convenience.

I will update this presentation in the next few weeks with responses I receive during the presentation, and will create a video version of the presentation that incorporates these responses. This video will appear on our YouTube channel.

SOURCES:

We Spend 80% of Classroom Time on Skills Needed for 10% of Jobs, Scott McLeod, Dangerously Irrelevant, August 3, 2010 

What Happens in Schools When Life Has Become an Open-Book Test?, Peter Pappas, Copy/Paste, March 23, 2010.

Manifesto for 21st Century Librarians, Joyce Kasman Valenza, Information Fluency, October 2010.

Photo Credit for Joyce Valenza: by Jim Graham.

The Impact of Education Technology on Student Achievement, Milken Family Foundation, July 9, 1999.

Photo Credit for Kiss

Wii Gaming Console Bowling Over Retirees, Lisa Baertlein, Reuters, May 23, 2007

Dell vs. Apple Stock Chart via Yahoo Finance

 FindingDulcinea Web Guide to Education

SweetSearch Social Studies

101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class

Sites for Learning About Countries

SweetSearch Biographies

Quote from Peter Pappas reported verbally to Mark Moran

SweetSearch

Mock Page from findingEducation

findingEducation On This Day Challenge

Quote from James Davey reported verbally to Mark Moran

LineTime World History Timeline

 10 Resons Your Educators Are Resisting Your Change Initiative

Yogi Berra, Baseball Digest, Sept 1956, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto, Laura Cohen, Librarian, SUNY Albany

Photo Credit for Watering Rocks, via Flickr

Photo Credit for Loss of Face, via Flickr

Photo Credit for Yoda

Photo Credit for Fear, Uncertainty Doubt, via Flickr

Shannon Miller, photo courtesy of Shannon Miller

Marlene Thornton, photo courtesy of Joyce Valenza

Training Teachers for 21st Century Classrooms, Bridget McCrea, The Journal, March 30, 2011

Brent Jorth, photo courtesy of Brent Jorth

Competence and Future Shock, Dan Gould, PSFK, September 16, 2008

Photo Credit for Shout-Out via Flickr

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 this blog post:

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

A description of the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial, a research-based, multimedia tutorial that teaches effective web research skills to both educators and students.

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

CONTACT INFO

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

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

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

 

 

 

 

A Study of Students Online Research Behavior

In January 2010, Dulcinea Media created a survey to assess the online research skills of middle school and high school students in New York State.  With the help of several school librarians and classroom teachers, we surveyed 300 students at nine schools about their research habits.  After analyzing our results, we published our report on the findings and implications of our study.  Download StudyStudentsOnlineResearch

 The majority of students in our study have access to computers at school and at home.  Three-quarters of those surveyed self-describe as “excellent” or “very good” at search.  Nevertheless, most middle school and high school students cannot adequately explain their search strategies, or how they evaluate a website’s credibility.

 At the middle school level, when querying a search engine, more than half of these students use “natural language” instead of keywords.  It appears likely that many simply copy the question or problem assigned by their teachers into a search engine’s search box.  When initial search results are unavailing, both middle school and high school students simply “keep trying” or “re-word” their queries, but they cannot adequately explain their methods for doing so.

 When they do locate a source they deem useful, roughly one-third of middle school students report choosing it because it “looked good,” “sounded good,” or has “the correct information.”  One middle school student’s approach to assessing information boiled down to, “if it’s what my teacher told me to find.”  In other words, once students find “the answer” they seek, they spend little effort considering the credibility of a resource.

 When we asked students how often they evaluate the author of a document or website, or the date it was published, the majority of respondents answered “rarely or never.”  In the comment box, one student notes, “It doesn’t really matter who the writer is.”  As for the date an article was published, another student writes, “I can’t find it.”

Our survey suggests that students’ Internet research skills are far from adequate. All students must learn how to construct a query and evaluate the results, how search engines function and how to develop consistent habits or workarounds in response to poor result listings. Acquiring sound search strategies as well as critical evaluations skills while they are still in school will better prepare these students for college and their future careers.

In Summer 2011, Dulcinea Media will introduce the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial, a comprehensive, multimedia approach to teaching students, and educators, how to use the Web to conduct research effectively.

Examples of Innovative Teaching Practices

 Since September 2006, we've been curating content and creating innovative tools to help educators integrate the Internet into their curriculum, and teach students how to use the Internet effectively.

A barrier to the wide adoption of our products is the status quo - textbooks and other crude tools from the 19th century that remain the primary method by which students learn. We've attended dozens of education conferences in the past two years, and have met thousands of passionate educators who are determined to bring about their own version of education reform - one that is focused on students. The goal of these efforts is to create a new system of education that is relevant to and engages students, addresses them as individuals, lets them develop their passions, and encourages the development of skills they'll need to succeed when they graduate, not the skills their parents needed when they graduated 30 years ago.

With the explosive growth in social media, it has become easier to interact with these educators on a daily basis, rather than at once-a-month conferences. The number of solid examples of innovative teaching practices we're seeing is growing exponentially. Here, we'll share just a few that we've come across recently.

In a blog post aptly titled, "Own It," Andy Marcinek writes of how he assigned his English 101: College Composition course what he termed, "not a standard, written essay, but a focused collection of media that they will use to inform, to persuade, to challenge or defend." He gave them a simple writing prompt, and then had them gather links, images, videos, and other media to synthesize, with his guidance, into a final presentation. Andy explains, "I am making an attempt to harness all the great resources we have available at the moment. I feel it is my moral obligation as a teacher to open up all learning avenues to them, not hide them." He then provides a new prompt, this one for his fellow educators: his work is "not the pinnacle of classroom innovation. It is a start. It is an idea that I hope you steal, remix and make your own, for your own students. Don’t we owe them that?"

One educator who feels Marcinek's sense of obligation to students is Lisa Neilsen, Technology Innovation Manager in NYC's public schools. In "Advice for Choosing Pages, Groups or Profiles When Using Facebook for Education," Neilsen gives advice and specific examples of educators who are using Facebook to teach, collaborate with students, and communicate with students, parents and others in the community. Nielsen writes that, "in schools where we’re doing what is right for kids, you see engaged youth who use the filter between their ears to determine how to best access information. Students are empowered rather than restricted from using personally owned digital devices in school.  At these schools they understand that people, not tools, have behavior.  Fortunately, more and more often these schools that mirror the real world are starting to crop up." 

One of the exemplars that Neilsen cites is Michelle Luhtala, whose library program at New Canaan High won the ALA's 2010 National School Library Media Program of the Year. Luhtala maintains separate personal and professional profiles on Facebook, as well as a Page for her library. In response to Nielsen's post, Luthala explains how friending students through her professional profile enabled her to, among other things, (i) get student input for the post, at 10 pm on a Friday night, (ii) collaborate with two groups of students who decided to enter a video contest at the last minute, and (iii) coordinate a trip by a large group of students to Philadelphia, for a Model UN.

Another teacher who is a living example of effective and innovative practices  is Pulaski (WI) High School English teacher Kim Noe, recent winner of the "Golden Apple Award" from the Green Bay (WI) Chamber of Commerce. According to the Green Bay Press Gazete, Noe's philosophy when it comes to technology is that students, “don’t turn it off very often, so why not tap into it?" The Gazette reports that, in Noe's classes, "tasks like memorizing vocabulary words are accompanied by related YouTube videos," students receive MP3 files with feedback to essays, and authors visit via Skype. Further, Noe chats with students every night on Facebook; she says, “I have found Facebook is one of the greatest tools to reach kids I could imagine.” How do the students react to Noe's practices? Her co-principal, Dan Slowey, tells the Gazette, “it becomes kind of a small, close-knit family in those classrooms.”

The last "practices" I want to note were not actually put into place by a classroom teacher; they were suggested by Ashley Appozardi, a student teacher who is observing classes. She sat in on the class of a teacher reviewing fractions, in the wake of a test where students had not performed well. In Azzopardi's view, the teacher:

"- Moved through the questions very quickly

- Did not give the students enough time to answer her questions

- Did not rub off the writing on the whiteboard once moved onto the next question

- Did not provide much praise to the students

- Did not allow the students to write anything in their books

- Did not allow the students to use concrete materials, and

- Did not use the interactive whiteboard."

Azzopardi believes that the students learned little from the lesson.

She echoes the calls from Marcinek and Nielsen to build upon the innovative work of other educators, as she writes, "we need to acknowledge that our students have changed radically. The educational system wasn’t designed to teach today’s students....Adapting materials to the language of this generation has already been done successfully, in particular the creation of games which help teach the content, even the most serious....I can only imagine how different that lesson could have been if the interactive whiteboard had been turned on. Instead of the students looking out the window, hoping not to be the one chosen to answer a confusing question next, they could have been excited, engaged, learning and participating in a visual and interactive math lesson."

These four educators are a very small sample of the passionate educators from all over the world who are beginning to offer up examples of innovative, and effective, teaching practices for educators to follow.

Mark E. Moran
CEO

 

In the comments, please offers your own examples that you invite others to "steal, remix and make [their] own."

You Can’t Teach Curiosity... But You Can Nourish It

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

- Albert Einstein

What does learning look like? Educators have been asking themselves this question for decades. How much time should young children spend playing and exploring and how much time should teachers dedicate to direct instruction?

In a recent DoubleX article, writer and developmental scientist Alison Gopnik explained how parental anxiety and government policies are driving schools towards a more rigid curriculum for pre-schoolers.  She argues that more direct instruction is not what young children need.

Gopnik cited two studies published in Cognition, a science journal; one from the University of California Berkeley, which she helped author, and another from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

In the MIT study, a teacher showed a group of 4-year olds a new toy with four tubes, saying, “I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!” She then showed them how to pull on a tube and make the toy squeak. For a second group of students, Gopnik showed the students a new toy, and said she had “just found it.” The teacher acted surprised when she pulled a tube and it let out a squeak.

The group of children given direct instruction played with only the one tube that squeaked, while the students who weren’t given direct instruction played with the toy longer and discovered many of the instrument’s hidden functionalities.

In Gopnik’s own study at U-C Berkeley, a researcher showed a new toy to 4-year olds and performed many actions, such as pushing buttons and pulling rings in different sequences. Some of these actions caused the toy to play music and some didn’t. With another group of 4-year olds, the researcher acted more clueless, saying things like, “Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works?” The group of students exposed to the “clueless” researcher were more likely to find the simplest way of making the toy play music, whereas the other group copied the more elaborate sequence modeled by the teacher.

 According to Gopnik, the study demonstrates that “[w]hile learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.”

Many other educators have written that, for authentic learning experiences, teachers must stop regarding themselves as experts and students as vessels into which they pour their knowledge. As John Seely Brown, consultant and former chief scientist at Palo Alto Research Center, asserts, the teacher must no longer be “the sage on stage.”  Seely Brown argues that pedagogy is transitioning towards participatory, passion-based learning, where students are encouraged to be curious, to solve problems and to discover their own interests. 

 This transition requires a significant shift in the teaching dynamic.

 Jeff Utecht, an education blogger at The Thinking Stick, explains, “We push when an effective education system is a pull system. Students need to pull education towards them around passion, curiosity, and imagination.” Or as Dan Pink, a former speechwriter to Al Gore turned motivational speaker and author, might say, students need to develop intrinsic motivation, rather than chasing “sweeter carrots.”

One way teachers can motivate students is to weigh their words well in advance, during the lesson planning stage, says Angela Maiers, a former teacher and education consultant.  “Often we think we are modeling skills and strategies for students when we are really just telling and assigning. The few minutes we spend thinking through our language can impact the flow and dynamics of the instruction.”

But changing the way teachers speak to students and enabling students to participate more directly in lessons doesn’t mean lowering expectations, it simply means changing our view of what learning looks like.

Returning to the example of pre-school students, Elizabeth Blackwell, a blogger for the parenting site Babble.com, grew worried when she compared her daughter’s preschool activities to those of children at other schools who had homework each night. She was concerned because her daughter couldn’t yet write the alphabet. But one day her daughter brought home a story she had dictated to her teacher. Ultimately, Blackwell came to realize that the story represented not only her daughter's imagination, but also an important phase in the reading process. 

 “Think of what it means from a child’s viewpoint: An adult is paying attention, writing down what I say … That’s a powerful incentive for learning,” Blackwell quoted Jerlean Daniel, deputy executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, as saying.

 (See also “What Playtime Means to Educators”)

 Elizabeth Devine, a Social Studies teacher at Hall High School in Hartford Conn., teaches passion-based learning in her classroom. In one course, students learn about human rights issues by creating action projects where they try to effect a significant local or global change. “It’s absolutely a challenge but if we give them suggestions, and guidance along the way, consult with them about what they’re doing, they generally come up with some really fabulous ideas.” Devine listed several examples of her student projects, from developing mentorships at lower-income schools to raising awareness about depression and suicide prevention, to helping curb domestic abuse and violence.

At the School of the Future, a progressive Grade 6-12 school in New York City, history teachers challenge students to ask questions and conduct research like real historians do. Science teachers helped students build a model of New York City that symbolized all of the parts of a human cell. According to Edutopia, “SOF measures the full range of student ability through formative assessments, presentations, exhibitions, and tests that focus on authentic tasks to assess students' skills and knowledge as they relate to real-world endeavors.”

School of the Future has a 98 percent graduation rate – which is all the more impressive given that most of the students at come from poorer families, with 40 percent qualifying for free or reduced-cost lunches.

 Students don’t need to begin their college preparation in pre-school. Instead, students of all ages need teachers need to step back and give them room to grow. Teachers who encourage autonomy, self-direction, and creativity are teaching students skills that will last them a lifetime.

Shannon Firth

Senior Writer

 

Time to Stop Teaching that ".Govs" Can Be Trusted

Sometime in the mid-1990s, someone created a tutorial that said that an important aspect of judging a Web site’s trustworthiness is its top-level domain, such as “.com,” “.edu,” “.org” and “.gov.”

This canard permeates virtually all Web tutorials to this day, and generally says that a Web site run by a government agency, school or organization could be trusted, while a commercial site, or “.com,” is suspect.

Teaching this does more harm than good.

First of all, it's simplistic.While students should understand the concept of Web addresses, the mere fact that something is published on a Web site with a .gov or .edu is now accorded far too much weight in evaluating its accuracy.

When we compiled the SweetSearch site index, we reviewed the entire lists of “.gov,” “.edu” and “.org” Web sites. Most of the “.gov” sites had a level of editorial oversight warranting their blanket inclusion in the index. But the presence of a sea of unaccredited schools meant “.edu” sites needed to be handpicked from the .edu list. And long gone are the days when “.org” meant a site was run by a well-intentioned not-for-profit organization; indeed, the .org index is now spammier than any other.

Further, students may not process much beyond the simplistic point. Debra Gottsleben, a librarian at Morristown (NJ) High School, tells of presenting a demo of the school's powerful databases. Minutes later, she found a student consulting Wikipedia instead. Asked to explain, he said "those databases are .coms, and Wikipedia is a .org, and my teacher says we can't trust .coms."

More importantly, an indispensible aspect to determining the accuracy of information is objectivity, which is often lacking in websites across all domains. In our presentations on teaching Web research skills, we teach that the first questions a student should ask when evaluating a Web site are "Who?" "Why?" and "When?"

When a student instead first asks "what's the top level domain?," it dilutes his analysis of who and why.

An Associated Press article from last week cites the example we've long noted; the presidential biographies on the official White House Website. It says, "White House biographies offer an unusual history lesson. Some are examples of blatant boosterism and outdated scholarship. Others are oddly selective or politically incorrect."

A current White House spokesman told AP that the White House would consider updating these biographies, but no amount of updating will change the "Why" - the site exists to celebrate the service of U.S. presidents, not to put forth a balanced, objective biography that includes a critical examination of presidential shortcomings.

For a more specific example of content on a .gov site being of highly questionable accuracy, read this press release from September 18, 2001 in which the EPA announces that "results from the Agency's air and drinking water monitoring near the World Trade Center and Pentagon disaster sites indicate that these vital resources are safe."

In an earlier blog post, James Sullivan related a lesson he learned while doing research for a profile of American political pamphleteer Anna Ella Carroll.

As Sullivan wrote, a frequently cited source of information on Carroll was the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame, a page found at the Maryland State Archives’ Web site—a “.gov.”

Carroll’s legacy is her disputed role as the mind behind the Civil War strategy that eventually led to demise of the Confederacy. She was a feminist and suffragette icon for supposedly being denied recognition for a monumental idea based on her gender. However, some respectable resources paint a picture of Carroll as a politically savvy self-promoter, who in all likelihood embellished her claim and manipulated evidence to support it. While we take no position as to the historical accuracy of either of these competing viewpoints, surely a controversial assertion such as this would warrant mention in any biography of Carroll.

Yet the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame piece ignores this contention, stating simply, “The President and his Cabinet kept her authorship a secret; the public was not to know that the Union plans were devised by not only a civilian, but by a woman.”

Why does this Website publish? In its own words, the Hall of Fame “seeks to honor Maryland women who have made unique and lasting contributions to the economic, political, cultural, and social life of the state and to provide visible models of achievement for tomorrow’s female leaders.” Perhaps Carroll would appear a less admirable role model if viewed as a cunning political mind rather than a repressed strategic genius.

This lesson reinforces the necessity of looking beyond the domain, and viewing potential source bias as a determining factor of Web site credibility, whatever letters its address ends in.

*****

Mark E. Moran

CEO

Want to Empower Students? Expect More of Them

What happens when educators and parents set high expectations for students?

Annie Sullivan was hired to tutor a young Helen Keller, an unruly deaf and blind child. Sullivan raised the expectation for how Helen would behave. In "The Miracle Worker," this leads to a heart-wrenching physical battle. They later reached a breakthrough moment as the teacher spelled a word into the child’s palm. As Helen wrote in her autobiography years later, 

“I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

Keller graduated with honors from Radcliffe College and became a renowned writer and public speaker because a teacher pushed her to recast her challenges from an excuse for poor table manners into “barriers that could be swept away.”

Maya Angelou faced her own barriers as a child. As a result of traumatic incidents, Angelou refused to speak from ages seven to 12. She found solace in poetry, and memorized the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare and others.

Angelou describes how a teacher, Mrs. Flowers, convinced her to speak:

“She said, ‘You don’t love poetry.’ And it was the cruelest thing I think she could have done. Because she seemed to be taking my only friend. 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.”

Decades later, that voice was used to read a poem at President Clinton's inauguration.

A similar encounter with a teacher helped create one of the great voices of the past half-century. When James Earl Jones went to high school, he was functionally mute, as a result of a severe stutter he developed at the age of five.

In a 2010 interview with The Daily Mail, Jones called a high school English teacher, Donald Crouch, "'the father of my voice." Crouch challenged Jones to prove that he did not plagiarize a poem by reading it out loud from memory in class. "Which I did. As they were my own words, I got through it," Jones said. Crouch continued to encourage Jones to read out loud every day, and get involved in debates.

For Helen Keller, Maya Angelou and James Earl Jones, Anne Sullivan and Mrs. Flowers and Donald Crouch all were the “one person” that Aimee Mullins says every child needs.

 Mullins is an athlete, model, actress, and motivational speaker, who had her legs amputated below the knee shortly after birth.  In a TED Talk titled "The Opportunity of Adversity," Mullins spoke the hideous synonyms she found in a thesaurus for the word “disabled.” What upset her, she said, weren’t the words themselves, but rather “the values behind the words and how we construct those values.”

 For a child to overcome the low expectations set by labels or value constructs, Mullins said, “all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power and you’re off. If you  can hand somebody the key to her own power, the human spirit is so receptive, if you…open a door for people at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You are teaching them to open doors for themselves."

If empowering students to reach their true potential is the root of education, how do educators achieve it?

Angela Maiers, an educator and author, focuses on the power of words. In "12 Ways to Let People Know They Matter" She writes that if we choose our words wisely, we can help students "stretch their thinking, envision success, and open the door to their true potential."

Steven R. Schrader, a language teacher in Japan, defines empowerment as “helping learners become aware that they can have an impact on their environment, and can exert some control over their circumstances.” Schrader writes that, when we use language to remind young people, especially those marginalized by society, of their potential, we give control over their circumstances back to them.

Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman has spoken about the powerful effect when students do envision success, exert control over their circumstances, and see the epiphany of their own power.

In a July 2009 interview, she argued that the present state of minority education in the U.S. may be worse than in the days of segregation, asserting that back then,

“We had teachers who had very high expectations....We were going to learn our tables, we were going to learn how to read. And we had this community buffer, because while the external world told us we weren’t important and couldn’t succeed, our parents said it wasn’t so … our teachers said it wasn’t so, our preacher said it wasn’t so, and so we knew it wasn’t so. … And we always were taught that we could change the world, and we had these role models everywhere. That’s missing today for so many of our children.”

Do you have high expectations for your students?

Are you the "one person" students need to learn to open doors for themselves?

Mark E. Moran

Update:

• Two years after I wrote this article, I met Angela Maiers, whose work I had quoted in it.
• I helped Angela launch Choose2Matter, a movement that reflects many of the principles above.
• I was blessed to witness its life changing impact on thousands of educators and students.
• Angela and I recently co-authored an online course that is the one vehicle that conveys all aspects of the most powerful message I have ever heard, and provides advice on adopting strategies included in this post.
• Among other things, it addresses the root cause of bullying and self-harm.
• It also cultures a foster of innovation that transforms #GeniusHour, PBL & other student-centered learning into something that launches a lifetime of learning, growing and changing the world.
• Click here to learn more!

Resources for National Poetry Month

Poetry has always been a favorite topic of the staff at findingDulcinea.

April is National Poetry Month, so we've aggregated all of our resources on poems and poets below:

Web Guide to Poetry - a narrated, organized guide to the best poetry sources online.

Article on Celebrating National Poem in Your Pocket Day; in 2011 it falls on April 14.

Listening to Poetry: 5 Poems Read Aloud By Their Authors

Biographies of Famous Poets, with links to primary sources:

Elizabeth Alexander

Emily Bronte

Gwendolyn Brooks

e.e. cummings

T.S. Eliot

William Faulkner

Allen Ginsberg

Seamus Heaney

Francis Scott Key

Omar Khayyam

Rudyard Kipling

Stanley Kunitz

Federico Garcia Lorca

Jose Marti

Gabriela Mistral

Pablo Neruda

Robert Pinsky

Edgar Allan Poe

Carl Sandburg

William Shakespeare

Süleyman the Magnificent

William Carlos Williams

William Butler Yeats

9 Things You Didn't Know About St. Patrick's Day

Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day, but most people know very little about the patron saint of Ireland. St. Patrick lived 16 centuries ago; that's why it's difficult to separate historical fact from myth. 

Here are the Top 9 Things You Didn't Know About St. Patrick's Day:

1. St. Patrick's first trip to Ireland was as a captive. When he was 16, Irish raiders snatched him from the home of his wealthy parents and brought him to Ireland, where he lived for six years before making his escape. He returned to Ireland many years later as a missionary.
2. St. Patrick did not drive the snakes out of Ireland; in fact, there weren't any there. Some historians believe that the snakes (symbols of evil) actually refer to the pagan influence that grew weaker as St. Patrick spread Christianity through Ireland.
3. March 17 is considered to be the date of St. Patrick’s death. The source for the date is the Annals of Ulster, which says that he died in 493, making him more than 100 years old. Modern historians believe that he actually died in 460 or 461.
4. The shamrock, a three-leaf clover, was the symbol St. Patrick used to explain the idea of the Holy Trinity when he was teaching Irish pagans about Christianity.
5. According legend, St. Patrick created the Celtic cross by combining the cross and the pagan image of the sun, in an attempt to ease the pre-Christian Irish into adopting his religion.
6. The first St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City was held in 1762. Irish soldiers serving in the English military united and marched to share their culture.
7. Irish soda bread does not contain raisins!  It doesn't have butter or eggs, either. In fact, you won't find anything called "Irish soda bread" for sale in Ireland, because it's not considered much of a delicacy. Consisting simply of flour, sour milk, salt and baking soda, real Irish soda bread is nothing like the cake-like treat we eat here. In fact, it becomes as hard as rock about an hour after baking.
8. The city of Chicago dyes the Chicago River green for the holiday. In 1962, the city dumped 100 pounds of dye into the river, and it was green for a week. Now it only uses 40 pounds; enough to keep the Chicago River showing off its Irish pride for just a few hours.
9. The Irish of Butte, Montana have the best celebration on this side of the Atlantic, according to the Butte Web site. Members of the Irish diasporas predominantly populate the town of 40,000; each year 30,000 people come to watch the St. Patrick's Day parade. The town's Ancient Order of Hibernians leads the parade, and revelers can touch Irish soil at nearby pubs.

For much more about St. Patrick's Day and why and how and where to celebrate it, visit findingDulcinea's Web Guide to St. Patrick's Day.

And if you've gotten this far and decided that this is the year you are finally visiting Ireland, then read our outstanding Web Guide to Ireland Travel, compiled by the many Hibernophiles on our staff.

Thank you for reading,

Mark E. Moran

CEO

Connect With the Past Through Rare Books

Sometime during the reign of Constantine roughly 1,600 years ago, four scribes penned a version of the bible in Greek on vellum parchment made from donkey and antelope skins.

This bible came to rest in a Christian monastery at the base of Egypt’s Mount Sinai, and was preserved for over a thousand years by dry desert air. In the mid 19th century it was discovered by Constantin von Tischendorf, an archaeologist and biblical scholar from Germany, and taken to Europe.

Today, this bible—the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest bible in the world—can be viewed in its surviving form from any computer with an Internet connection, thanks to the efforts of institutions from the countries where pieces of the book now reside: England, Russia, Germany and Egypt.

Dr. Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library, called the Codex Sinaiticus “one of the world’s greatest written treasures.” That it’s freely available for all to experience is nothing short of amazing. You can find it here.

As an undergraduate I spent many hours in my school’s rare books library, sometimes doing class-related research, other times satisfying my own curiosity. I remember the whole experience having a ceremonial quality: the presentation of the delicate, often decaying object; handling the pages with extreme care, in some cases through white cotton gloves; and observing a general reverence for the books among all those present.

The books were both pieces of art and historical artifacts, and I felt honored to hold such a private audience with them. (If it pains you to think about what was lost when the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed in the 3rd century AD, then you know what I’m talking about.)

Although you won’t be able to turn the musty pages yourself, you can browse through a phenomenal rare books collection right from your computer, thanks to the Library of Congress’s Rare Book & Special Collections Division. The collection is wide-ranging and diverse, and the digital files are so high resolution you’ll feel like the books are right in front of you.

James Sullivan
Editor

21st Century Activities for Women's History Month

This week, I scoured the Web for lesson plans and activities for Women's History Month. Few, if any, asked students to do Web research, demonstrate media literacy, synthesize multiple resources, communicate their findings in a manner that engages modern audiences, or share their project outside the walls of their school.

Below I suggest a few activities that will help students learn about inspiring women and seminal events in women's history, and also offer a learning experience that is relevant to the world in which they live and will one day seek to work. At the end of the post, we list our free resources to assist students in their work, and discuss an opportunity for students to publish their work.

Create a Timeline on Life.com

Life.com offers an extensive collection of photos from Life Magazine's legendary archives, as well as from Getty Images. It enables users to create and share a timeline of photos they select, and to write a caption for each photo. Here are four sample timelines about women in history. Caution: some of the photos on Life.com have adult themes, or may depict gore or violence.

Research Women's Firsts in 2010

History is not only what happened long ago; it is made every day. Two years ago, we partnered with The Women on the Web on "2008 Firsts for Women," a collection of women from all over the world who became the first of their gender to achieve something significant in 2008. One example was Brittany Cantazaro, who at the age of 19, had become New York Waterway’s first female ferry captain. Only a week after we published her profile, Brittany piloted the first ferry to rescue passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 after Captain Sullenberger landed it in the Hudson River. She exhibited wisdom beyond her years by cutting the engines of the ferry to avoid creating a wake that could have sent the plane's passengers plunging into the chilly water.

Have a team of students research and create "2010 Firsts for Women." In learning about women who are breaking barriers today, students will ponder why this is so, and gain a greater appreciation for those woman who broke barriers so many years ago.

A research tip: databases, which allow for more precise date targeting than any search engine, will be indispensible for identifying 2010's firsts for women.

Write a Series of Articles with a Common Theme, or Add to One of Ours

We've created a number of series of articles about women around a common theme:

• When we learned about Ada Lovelace, who created one of the world's first computer programs, we created a series of 6 Unsung Women who never got fair credit for their brilliant ideas, heroic deeds or extraordinary work, often due to prejudice, discrimination or the social mores of their time.
• Women who found their calling later in life often have the most unexpectedly inspiring stories. Last year, we again teamed with The Women on the Web to profile Late Bloomers, a handful of women who came into their own later in life, demonstrating the power of perseverance and the value of experience.
• In Women Who Dared, we recognized 15 women whose actions—in courtrooms, on buses, in polling booths and in planes—shattered the status quo. Through guts, grit and unyielding perseverance these women made a difference, raising our expectations for ourselves, our daughters, and our granddaughters.
• In Women of Honor: Writers Who Won’t Be Silenced, we honored five dissident writers whose lives and struggles enlighten and inspire us. One of the writers, Iryna Khalip, has since been arrested in Belarus and charged with criminal acts for speaking out against the government.

A class of students could develop a series of articles around their own theme, or write articles to add to one of our series.

On This Day Challenge

A student (or group of students) chooses a significant event from women's  history and uses the Web to research and gather information on the chosen event. Using critical thinking and analysis skills, the student then writes an article on the event, citing the Web sources. We provide specific instruction on how to write an On This Day article, and offer a dozen examples of events from women's history on this page.

Create Videos or Slideshows Instead of Articles

To create a video portrait of a woman or series of women, students could use a screen capture software product, such as Camtasia, to capture text, images and excerpts of videos of the women profiled, or a product such as Animoto to create a narrated video slideshow. Both products' websites offer extensive tutorials. In each case, students must conduct Web research, and then assemble the images, write a script, and create the end-product. The students' work could be displayed on a school website or their own blogs, or Teacher Tube or YouTube, and thus reach audiences across the globe.

Resources

To support students, we offer these resources:

• SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students,
• Ten Steps to Better Web Research,
• How to Avoid Plagiarism by Paraphrasing Correctly, and
• How to Synthesize Multiple Resources into an Article.

Opportunity for Students to Get Published

In the 21st century, everyone is a publisher. Students must learn to create work that is seen outside the walls of their school building. We'll happily publish on findingDulcinea any student work that you submit to us that links to excellent online resources and is well-written for the student's grade level. Alternatively, we'll publish a series of blog posts throughout the month that highlight and link to student projects on school or student Websites. Note also that the On This Day Challenge, discussed above, offers a more formal opportunity for students to get published and win prizes.

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

To Make SweetSearch Even Sweeter, Just Add You

SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students, recently turned two.

This milestone, plus a 600% increase in traffic this year, exploding awareness and an unending stream of effusive reviews, have given us plenty to celebrate.

But we're never content to rest on our laurels. In the past few months, we introduced SweetSearch4Me, a search engine for emerging learners, and integrated Yolink into each of our search engines to utterly transform student search. 

By this summer, we'll introduce a fresh new look, additional functionality, and more partner link-ups, all of which will make SweetSearch an even better search engine for students.

But there is one more essential ingredient we need to add to SweetSearch.

That ingredient is you.

SweetSearch is the product of 150,000+ hours of research by the scores of staff research experts and educator consultants who created findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles.

SweetSearch searches a "whitelist" comprised only of these 35,000 links that we included in findingDulcinea content, as well as sites we've since uncovered by sifting through published recommendations of librarians and teachers.

We've been fortunate to get to know thousands of educators who are as passionate and knowledgeable about quality educational content online as we are. We now seek to tap your passion, knowledge and direct experience by asking you to recommend high quality sites for ages 13+ (including sites useful for educators) to add to SweetSearch, and/or sites for ages 4-12 to add to SweetSearch4Me. Hundreds of great new educational Websites or content archives come online every month, and we can't catch them all without your help.

We'd also like to know if there are any sites in either search engine that you think we should delete. Also, we can "weight" sites, so please let us know if there are sites you think should generally appear higher or lower than they currently do.

We're not looking for quantity - we already have 35,000 sites! No, we're looking purely for quality - tell us about great sites that you've used yourself or with your students. Some terrific sites may cover a narrow topic or geographical area and thus may not have come across our radar.

Our only bright-line tests for rejecting a Website is when the site does not specify who published it, or when the advertisements are so intrusive that it's difficult to delineate between the content and advertisements. We look forward to reviewing any site that you recommend as useful for teachers and students to use.

To add you to the mix that is SweetSearch, please complete this Google Web Form.

Thank you!

Mark Moran

CEO, Dulcinea Media

 

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search Skills of the Lost Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversely, we've come across hundreds of schools with very strong library programs that anchor a true 21st century curriculum that teaches students the skills they'll need to succeed in the workforce. We're encouraged that our presentation on teaching Web research skills has been downloaded 250,000+ times, and is being taught as part of the curriculum at colleges of education and library science. Students who learn these skills will become the eventual political and business leaders of our world; students who don't will continue to get tripped up by scammers who finagle a high position in Google's search results.

Mark Moran

CEO