findingDulcinea

Educon - Keynote from Educon, by Leroy Nunery

I'll be sharing informal posts from Educon throughout this weekend.

Chris Lehman, Principal of Science Leadership Academy, welcomed everyone.

Chris spoke of Friday's events. The students of SLA had planned presentations for months, which were to be given to early attendees on Friday. At 7:00 a.m., Chris sent out the news that Friday would be a snow day, and school would be closed. By 7:01 a.m., students were texting Chris to ask "what do we need to do?" More than 100 students showed up to make their presentations.

Chris: the goal of the weekend is to set ourselves up to innovate. He challenges us to CONNECT - it's a challenging and exciting time to be an educator; we need to connect with like-minded, dedicated, passionate educators to renew ourselves to face the challenges ahead.

He challenges us to LEARN - deeply, from each of the sessions. Take time to reflect on it. Walk out of hear Sunday with a plan, so that Educon lives beyond Sunday and the walls of this building. Learn, and develop a plan for change.

Saturday morning kicked off with a keynote speech by Leroy Nunery, Deputy Superintendent, School District of Philadelphia.

Leroy: Educon is not a conference - it's more like a "revival." Strong spirit to it.

Budget issues we are facing right now are the scariest of our lifetime. This is being seen across the country. Low or no growth in revenue, federal ARRA stimulus is going away. We do not regret spending the stimulus to save jobs and make investments - that's what stimulus is.

Like many districts across the country, we are looking at our Master Plan; we realize we have 70,000 unfilled seats, due to demographic shifts and no population growth in Philadelphia. Many of our buildings are decades old, with deferred maintenance issues. How do we adjust our physical facilities to create better learning environments for our students?

Half our high school students cross the city, using public transportation, to a school of their liking. The Master Plan is to make it easier for students to find what they want closer to home, including through the use of technology.

What we face as a public entity is what private businesses face: competition. There are many charter and private schools in Philadelphia, and their numbers are growing. "Cyber Charters" are growing rapidly, enabling students to learn from home. A "Blended Environment" is emerging, where students will learn, at least in part, from home.

What's the value of what you provide? Compared to what's out there privately. We need to establish our value proposition, justify it to the public and policymakers.

Enrollment has dropped 10,000 since 2006, projected to drop another 10,000 by 2016, to 145,000. 70,000 empty seats right now - enough to fill Lincoln Field (football stadium).

"Imagine 2014" - extensive discussion with the public on "must have" needs for schools. The public loves the opportunity to have input. You often hear that schools should cut the arts, music, foreign language, athletics. Yet these are mentioned most when the public is asked what schools need. Security and comfort also ranks high - clean bathrooms, security cameras, green spaces and playgrounds. Series of workships around the city in the next two weeks.

Consolidation presents opportunities. Resource efficiencies, program realignment, service alignment, and program enhancement. Stop hiding behind bureaucracy.

Program realignment - try to match school curriculum to the marketplace. Are we generating too many chefs, and not enough specialists in biotechnology and agriculture?

What do we do?

Be creative!!!!

Optimize opportunities - consolidate underutilized facilities, collaborate with other districts (500 in PA!), institutions, corporations, leverage best practices.

Can education reform? Hyundai, Subaru, VW are proof you can.

Create Centers of Excellence that leverage existing competencies, existing know-how and existing space.

We need to re-think how we use space. Individualize learning.

What is the value of a seat? Instructional costs - teachers, materials, admin staff. Non-instructional costs: facilities, utilities, maintenace staff, transportation, community and neighborhood impact. He wants communities to be proud of their neighborhood schools, and for the local kids to want to go to their local school.

Definition of a "Quality Seat."

SchoolNet Instructional Management System gives one-stop real-time access to all student data for admins, teachers and parents.

Trying to be creative, find best of breed content partners.

How do we attract the best teachers to Philadelphia and have them ready to teach? Attrition is also an issue. Lure of suburban schools - safer, quieter.

Current Status of Classrooms: 4,000 upgraded classrooms with interactive whiteboard, projectors, teachers with computers.

SDP STEM Education Programs - decrease the opportunity gap and increase the STEM pipeline. How do we replicate SLA? How do we show our students they don't need to leave city schools to learn STEM?

Working with U Penn, Franklin Institute, Temple.

STEM Classrooms, STEM Clubs, Integrated STEM courses.

Out of school programs. Collaborate with professionals and industry. Help them find local talent.

Mobile lab equipment.

Mark Moran, CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presentation to Lynbrook North Middle School

Today I am presenting to the faculty at Lynbrook North Middle School.

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.

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

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY AND THE WEB 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.

Peter Pappas - What Happen in School When Life Becomes an Open Book Test?

Dulcinea Media’s 2010 Survey of 300 Students on Web Research Skills

ERIAL Study - Searching for Better Research Habits

Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” : On the Horizon. NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001

Henry Jenkins – Presentation at TedxNYED

Knight Commission: findingDulcinea

Review of SweetSearch - Paul Gilster

Dalton Sherman, Dallas ISD

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

Children Have Changed History; Can They Change Education?

This week we came across four different content pieces that coalesced in a single thought in our head: children have changed history, and they must be the ones who lead change in education.

 

The first piece is the best example of the power of a child to change history since a fictional young boy shouted "but the Emperor has nothing at all on." Letters of Note  featured a letter from 11yo Grace Bedell to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, in which she urged, "let your whiskers grow...you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President." Lincoln responded coolly, but heeded young Grace's advice, grew one of the most famous beards in history, was elected president, and 150 years later, politicians still try to claim his mantle.

The second is from Doug Johnson, Director of Media and Technology for the Mankato (MN) Public Schools, author of "The Blue Skunk Blog," and one of the brightest minds writing about what education could be. In "Dear Students, Please Led a Thoughtful Revolution," he urges students to "foment a quiet revolution"- one in which students assume much more control over their learning. Johnson concludes "I am less and less convinced that adults will be able to fundamentally change how school is done. I think it will be up to you..." (Make sure also to read this follow-on comment from librarian Shannon Miller of the Van Meter, Iowa schools, where the quiet revolution is taking hold).

The third post is one of the most wonderful ones I've read since we began this journey. In "The Jury Is In," Shelley Wright, a high school biology teacher in Saskatchewan, Canada, writes of the results of her experiment of letting students run the class for two weeks. At the end of this period, she announced there would be a standard quiz to test what students had learned. One perpetually failing student, perhaps empowered by gaining some measure of control over her learning, complained that "when she looks at the questions she goes blank" and asked, “If that happens, can I turn over the paper and write all of the stuff I do know?”  The next day, the students received their quiz, with one question: "Tell me what you’ve learned."

 

The fourth post is the Huffington Post's coverage of the "Education Summit" in Washington, D.C. this week. Led by Jed Bush, it "offered a venue for state education secretaries, superintendents, university professors and business execs to share ideas." As with many prior summits, "teachers" are conspicuously missing from the list. What was discussed at this "summit"? The same thing discussed at prior summits - No Child Left Behind, charter schools, distance learning technology, politics and ideology.

 

In a television intervivew afterwards, Bush and another man focused solely on using the Internet for distance learning, by extending the reach of specially qualified teachers. No doubt, a useful concept, but as the the students of Doug Johnson, Shannon Miller or Shelley Wright could have told them, one that doesn't go nearly far enough. It keeps the teacher in the center, with students sitting passively - and restlessly - in rows, absorbing, in the hopes of being able to soullessly regurgitate the information when cued.

 

Unaccompanied by significant pedagogical changes that leverages how the world has changed and students have changed, a more qualified teacher on a screen is only a marginal improvement over a less-qualified teacher in class, just as an e-textbook is an inadequate successor to a physical textbook, and a Smart Board not exploited to its potential is simply a chalkboard that runs up the electric bill.

 

Let's hope there are thousands of Grace Bedells in our midst to quietly foment a revolution. Because our education emperors have nothing at all on.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Sweet Search: A Search Engine for Teachers

A year ago, we introduced SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students, and we explained why it is the best search engine for them to use. It was a bold concept – a search engine whose Web resources had been evaluated by actual research experts as well as teacher and librarian consultants. We didn’t apply a filter – we created a whitelist. Reviews have uniformly praised SweetSearch as an outstanding tool for students, who generally lack the necessary skill used to differentiate between credible results and those that lack authority.

During this school year, we’ve learned of another group of people that may actually appreciate SweetSearch even more than students – teachers.

While most educators have the wisdom and experience to review dozens of search results to find the most useful one, they don’t always have the time.  As Paul Gilster, a technology journalist, wrote in the News Observer about SweetSearch:

“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.”

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

 

SweetSearch has also integrated Yolink, a tool that highlights keywords in context, showing how many times the term is used and in what context, so that anyone can quickly scan a page and easily determine which results will be most helpful for a particular task. The search terms and surrounding context can then be saved 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.

There’s only one way to know whether SweetSearch can be useful to you. Try it for yourself.  Today. Why not right now?

On behalf of all your friends at findingDulcinea/SweetSearch, have a safe and happy Thanksgiving!


Shannon Firth
Senior Writer

The Bixby Letter and Teaching Students the Fragile Truth of History

The 1998 Steven Spielberg film, “Saving Private Ryan” finds its premise in the “Bixby Letter,” which was read in the opening scene, and had been sent by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, to a mother who had lost five sons who fought for the Union in the Civil War. The letter gained instant fame when it was published in The Boston Evening Transcript on November 25, 1864.

The scene from the movie was re-enacted when Tom Hanks, the star of Saving Private Ryan, was awarded AFI’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Spielberg closed by saying “those words, written 80 years before D-Day, remind us that our experience is a living history, and that there is much to learn about now, from yesterday.”

A year after Saving Private Ryan opened, American Heritage published an article titled, “The Trouble with the Bixby Letter.” It noted that one Lincoln scholar declared that it “stands with the Gettysburg Address as a masterpiece in the English language,” while another called it “a piece of the American Bible.”

However, the article points out two issues with the letter. The first is that the animus behind the writing of the letter may have been misplaced; Mrs. Bixby apparently only lost two sons in the war and may have been a Confederate sympathizer who resented the letter and tore it up. More importantly, the article provides evidence that the letter was actually written by Lincoln’s personal secretary, John Hay, although perhaps with substantial input from, or outright dictation, by Lincoln.

The issue of who wrote the Bixby Letter will never be conclusively resolved. And to many, it may not matter so much whether Lincoln actually wrote the letter or merely authorized its issuance under his name. There remains a great deal of truth in Spielberg’s words that the letter shows “there is much to learn about now, from yesterday.”

The letter is a famous example of the need to teach students to adopt a healthy level skepticism (not cynicism), and desire to determine the truth, about everything they read or hear. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history ? A fable agreed upon."

The recent Texas school textbook controversy starkly showed that the “history” that is taught to students is somewhat determined not by impartial scholars but by contemporary personal or political agendas. But political and ideological bias, from all corners, in textbooks is not a new issue. A 1989 journal article calls textbooks a “regulated commodity” and part of  “the political process of adjudicating among the claims of different class, race, gender, and religious groups.”

With this as a backdrop, what is more important to teach students: how to memorize a particular version of the "facts," understand the narrow viewpoints presented, and be able to regurgitate both - or how to think critically for themselves?

At Dulcinea Media, we come down squarely on the side of the latter. My daughter each days reads flash cards to ready herself for an AP US History exam - a soulless learning experience unlikely to form knowledge that remains with her more than 15 minutes after the exam proctor says “pencils down.”

On the other hand, if instead of committing to memory specific facts and particular viewpoints, she were encouraged to think for herself about history – well, that would stay with her forever.

Encouraging students to think for themselves has been a guiding principal of findingDulcinea since we first picked up our “pencils” in September 2006.

One way we do so is by making it easy to find primary sources about a subject.  Every second my child spends viewing or reading an interview, letter, or diary entry, rather than a textbook page, is time she spends thinking for herself about the import of the document in front of her.

To provide context for the many interview sites we've uncovered, we publish "Interview of the Day," which leads students 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 two 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.”

In “On This Day,” and "Happy Birthday," we include a healthy injection of primary sources, drawing from resources such as this repository of video and audio recordings of 20th Century presidential speeches. We discuss what led up to an important historical event, what happened in the ensuing years, draw historic parallels where relevant, and, as noted in this blog post following the death of Howard Zinn, we discuss controversies and contrary viewpoints about the event, whether it be the bombing of Coventry, the impeachment of President Clinton, the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, the myth of the messenger who ran to Marathon, or exploring the question of whether the Wright Brothers were the first men to fly.

Many times, we help teach skepticism by covering historic hoaxes, such as:

• one in today’s On This Day, about “Piltdown Man,” about a skull discovered in 1912 that, for 41 years, was thought conclusively to be evidence of the “missing link” between apes and humans;
• the 8 month saga of Donald Crowhurst, who spent many months deceiving the world into believing he was an underdog winning an around-the-world sailing race; and
• the infamous Rosie Ruiz, who is believed to have faked a high-ranking finish in the New York City Marathon and then a win in the Boston Marathon.

In our Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web research, we help educators teach students the skills they need to assess the credibility of a source, and to find confirmatory, opposing or alternative viewpoints. We caution that students must analyze every aspect of a site to determine if it is authoritative, objective, and up-to-date. Teachers themselves need to stop teaching students that ".gov" sites are always reliable - for example, WhiteHouse.gov is not at all objective when it comes to the legacy of presidents, the various federal agencies provide an elevated view of their importance and success.

To bring a healthy skeptical attitude forward to the events of today, we compare pop culture depictions of history to reality, such as in these articles about Amelia Earhart and the racehorse Secretariat, both the subjects of recent movies.

Furthermore, our Beyond the Headlines section is unlike anything students will find anywhere else.  It provides a 360-degree view of current events by cohesively weaving together information from multiple sources, and offering the best-reasoned opposing viewpoints on controversial topics. 

A white paper released by the Knight Commission, written by Professor Renee Hobbs of Temple University’s Media Education Lab, read in part:

"Finding Dulcinea... addresses the “context deficit” that occurs  with online searching….“Behind the Headlines,” which provides contextual  background information on news and current events, while another section, “Suspicious Sites,” offers an analysis of how sites with inaccurate and misleading information can be made to seem credible.”

As the sentiments of Steven Spielberg intimated, this is the purpose of teaching students how to think critically about history – so they can learn to think critically about today.  This will carry them – and our society - a lot further than their memorizing flash cards.

 

Mark 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

 

Integrating the Web into the Social Studies Curriculum

This Thursday, November 11, I am presenting at the Annual Meeting of the National Social Studies Supervisors Association, in Denver, CO, on "A Practical Approach to Integrating the Web into the Social Studies Classroom."

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

 

A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO INTEGRATING THE WEB INTO SOCIAL STUDIES CLASS

Click here for the presentiation, which I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare.

Links to all of the dozens of Websites, blogs, and articles referenced in the presentation may be found at the bottom of this post.

 

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

Also check our landing page of our material for social studies; we will be expanding and augmenting this in coming months with the best content from third party providers:

SweetSearch - Social Studies

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 with any questions.

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

"Like" SweetSearch on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

 

LINKS IN "A PRACTICAL APPROACH" PRESENTATION

If no link is provided for a quote, then the quote is a statement made directly to Dulcinea Media.

Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” : On the Horizon. NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001

Peter Pappas - What Happen in School When Life Becomes an Open Book Test?.

Dulcinea Media’s 2010 Survey of 300 Students on Web Research Skills

ERIAL Study - Searching for Better Research Habits

Henry Jenkins – Presentation at TedxNYED

UCL - Information behavior of the researcher of the future (UCL review)

Joyce Valenza – Manifesto for 21^st Century School Librarians

SweetSearch2Day

Teaching the Ten Steps to Better Web Research

What is the Big 6

Information Search Process

As Shamu Show Goes On….

Knight Commission: findingDulcinea

On This Day: Susan B. Anthony Votes

Hoy en la Historia: Gettysburg Address

SweetSearch

Review of SweetSearch - Paul Gilster

Angela Maiers

We Blogg-Ed - Will Richardson

Dangerously Irrelevant - Scott McLeod

Free Tech for Teachers - Richard Byrne

EduTecher - Adam Bellow

The Innovative Educator – Lisa Nielsen

Educators PLN

Classroom 2.0

Teacher Tools to Connect

Ed Camp

Milestone Documents – Top 10 Blogs for History Teachers

Twitter4Teachers – Social Studies

Education Podcast Network – Social Studies

History News Network

Educators that Rock!

The History Teacher’s Attic

TED Talks Demystified

Teach Paperless

Ms. Goldhawk’s Web

Springfield Township Wikispaces

WallWisher

Sites for Learning About Countries

Skype

ePals

Flat Classrooms

Educators that Rock – Bill Reilly

Red Hand Day

The Memory Project

101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class

Web Guide to the Civil War

SweetSearch – Social Studies

American Rhetoric

Milestone Documents

Miller Center for Public Affairs

Soldier Studies

Library of Congress

Time magazine (archives date to 1923)

New York Times (free: 1851-1922; 1987- present)

Rag Linen

Guardian World News

American Memory Project

Museum Syndicate

Life Photo Gallery

Nations Illustrated

National Endowment for the Humanities: Picturing America

Ben’s Guide to U.S. Government for Kids

History Matters: Secrets of Great History Teachers

Wolfram Alpha for Educators

Smithsonian Education

The Pursuit of Technology Integration Happiness

Teaching High School Psychology

Don’t Just Put a Movie On

The Week in Rap

Games for Change

The American President

Lizard Point

Library of Congress

PBS People’s Century

The Paris Review

Oyez

Vietnam Center and Archive:  The Oral History

Interview of the Day - Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart describing her famous flight

Discovery Education

HarpWeek

History Animated

The UK National Archives

The Living Room Candidate

findingEducation – Sample page

 

Why SweetSearch's Results Are Much Better Than Those of Blekko

We warmly welcome a new entrant to the field of human-curated search - Blekko. It has gotten a trove of publicity from its formal launch today, with articles on the Websites of WSJ, NYT, Wired.com, The Next Web, the Atlantic, and many others.

You might not expect us to welcome a new "competitor," but that would be narrow-minded. The only "competitor" we worry about is the status quo. The vast majority of search users use Google only, and either don't know or don't care that the search results often do a poor job of providing them with the information they need. So we welcome the attention a new entrant brings to this issue. We also know that the search market is so vast that one more entrant won't be a barrier to our eventual success, in light of the significant inroads we've already made, particularly in education.

Blekko also doesn't worry us because we've compared its results to those of SweetSearch, and, just as we concluded in a head-on comparison to Google and Bing, we found that SweetSearch's results are far superior to those of Blekko for research-oriented queries. This includes not only the types of searches made by students and teachers, but anyone who is trying to get a comprehensive view of an issue.

To be clear about one important point: in Ten Steps to Better Web Research, we urge users to learn "the full toolkit" of search options. We note that not even we use SweetSearch 100% of the time. There are instances in which Google, Bing, and surely Blekko will provide better search results. Think of these tools as complementary, not competitive, to one another, and use more than one on every serious research inquiry. Indeed, SweetSearch offers a "toggle button" to help you easily compare Google's results.

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. For emerging 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.

We constantly evaluate our search results 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; many of these show up in Blekko.

For a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch, 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 Web site.

 

Enough of the "press release."  We'll compare the results for Sweet Search and Blekko for George Washington, Diabetes Complications, and Comet Hartley, the green comet that is currently making a close pass of the earth. I did not use quotation marks, since most search users don't.

For George Washington, Blekko returns 19 results on the first page; the first six include the homepage of George Washington University, the Wikipedia entry, the entry in IMDB about a movie that has no connection to the first U.S. president, a silly YouTube video, and user-generated content from Answers.com. A total of four of the 19 results provide credible information about the first president of the United States. Using a Blekko-suggested slash-tag, such as history, improves the quality and relevance of the results, but turns up very narrow entries about specific aspects of George Washington's life, not the broad overview someone searching his name would expect.

Now let's analyze the SweetSearch results. SweetSearch always displays two sets of search results - first, up to three results from findingDulcinea, and secondly, from the full index of 35,000 sites. This search produces stellar results from findingDulcinea, including a blog entry that discusses why George Washington has two birthdays, and a short profile that links to seven of the most outstanding Web resources about him, including a biography published in 1807, which you won't easily find using any other search engine. The "natural" results add his profile on Whitehouse.gov and C-Span's American Presidents, the documents collections of the Miller Center and the Library of Congress, entries from the LOC student site and other student-friendly sites, and a few recent news stories.

The results from Blekko for diabetes complications are all high-quality. Interviews with its founder indicate that Blekko searches only a universe of 150 Web sites for health queries. Ironically, we find this is too few; the results, while all credible, appear to be largely redundant. We estimate that SweetSearch indexes 1,000 health-focused Websites, and also searches the health content on thousands of mainstream media Websites, which complement the information provided by the health-focused sites. Thus, its natural search results for diabetes complications includes results from medical journals and news publications, as well as the outstanding blog "DLife," which collectively provide a more rounded view than the narrow results on Blekko. The findingDulcinea results all come from our Web Guide to Diabetes, and include four well-curated, synergistic links in the context of a narrated, organized guide that was created by a registered nurse and checked by an editor and quality assurance guru.

Of the first 20 results on Blekko for Comet Hartley, roughly six are well-written "passion sites," created by an individual who is passionate about the subject, but does not disclose any academic or journalistic credentials; these sites are fine if you are knowledgable about the subject, but otherwise you don't know whether you can trust the content. Additionally, seven of the 20 results are identical re-posts of NASA's press release that it is sending a spacecraft to rendezvous with the comet.

On SweetSearch, you find mostly outstanding results from credible resources, such as Sky and Telescope Magazine, EarthSky (created by top scientists), NASA, HubbleSite, Phys.org, and several news publications.

Please let us know what you think of Sweet Search! Write us at [email protected]

 

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web Research - Supplemental Materials

 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. Where the footnoted material is available online, it may be accessed by clicking on the highlighted text below.

1. Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” : On the Horizon. NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001

2. Els Kuiper, Monique Volman and Jan Terwel. “Students' use of Web literacy skills and strategies: searching, reading and evaluating Web information.” Information Research: Vol. 13, No.3,  (September, 2008).

3. Shu-Hsien L. Chen. “Searching the Online Catalog and the World Wide Web.” Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences, 41 1 (September 2003) 29-43

4. A Study of Students' Online Search Behavior, Mark E. Moran and Shannon A. Firth, April 30, 2010.

 5. On “Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society. February 24, 2010.

6.UCL. “Information behavior of the researcher of the future”: 11 January 2008.

7. Steve Kolowich, Searching for Better Research Habits, Inside Higher Ed, September 29, 2010

8.  Eisenberg, Mike. “What is the Big 6.” The Big 6: Information & Technology Skills for Student Achievement, (1997)

 9. “Research Skills.” State Library of Victoria. Ergo. (2010)

10. Media Post: Google Research Focuses on Search Failures, September 21, 2010

11. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea,” The New York Times, February 13,2005.

12. Eszter Hargittai etal, “Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content,” International Journal of Communications 4 (2010), 468-494, 1932-8036/20100468

Dulcinea Media

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

SweetSearch

SweetSearch4Me                                   

Yolink                       

Primary Sources?                      

Original Source?

Can’t Cite Wikipedia            

Who Wrote It?                                               

Why Did They Write It?                                               

When Did They Write It?

 

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Do not hesitate to contact our CEO at Mark [dot] Moran [at] DulcineaMedia [dot] com with any questions.

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

"Like" SweetSearch on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

 

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

Dulcinea Media provides free tools and content that help educators teach students how to use the Web effectively.  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

            Click here for widgets for SweetSearch and our other products.

Transforming Web Research for Students

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

Educators Will Create the Replacement for Textbooks

Materials for VanMeterBPCHS

Today I am presenting via Skype to a session with faculty as Bonner and Prendie Catholic High School in Drexel Hill, PA. The session will be led by Shannon Miller, star librarian at Van Meter Schools in Iowa. It is part of an innovative partnership arranged by the leaders of these schools - Superintendent John Carver and Principal Deron Durflinger at Van Meter, and William Brannick at Bonner and Prendie. As you may have heard, the world is getting flatter by the moment. Leaders such as these are determined to teach their students how to operate in a flatter, more inter-connected world.

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.

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

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

Angela Maiers: Learning Now

Dalton Sherman, Dallas ISD

 

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

Presentation of Ten Steps to Better Web Research at TSETC, October 2, 2010

I'm presenting today at the Tri-State Education Technology Conference (#TSETC) at New Milford High School in New Jersey.

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

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 external links are footnoted and appear on the 2nd to last and 3rd to last pages. Links to Dulcinea Media articles appear on the last page.

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

Dulcinea Media's products 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

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

I'm presenting today at the Tri-State Education Technology Conference (#TSETC) at New Milford High School in New Jersey.

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

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 external links are footnoted and appear on the 2nd to last and 3rd to last pages. Links to Dulcinea Media articles appear on the last page.

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

Dulcinea Media's products 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

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

The Day Iron Workers Bombed LA Times Building, Julie Andrews Turns 75, Discover Letters of Note

SweetSearch2Day features only the very best daily content from around the Web. One feature we offer that is relatively new and unknown, yet remarkable, is Letters of Note. Several times a week, it offers images of historic letters, with a transcript.

Examples include a letter from Harry Truman to a documentarian, defending the process by which he decided to drop the atom bomb; a letter home from Kurt Vonnegut, from a repatriation camp in Germany, just after the experience that led to the writing of Slaughterhouse Five;  and a secret coded letter sent by an American Lt. General during the Revolutionary War.

In On This Day, we explore how on Oct. 1, 1910, dynamite set by union member J.B. McNamara exploded and set the Los Angeles Times building ablaze, killing 21 and injuring more than 100.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, employers and workers in all parts of the United States clashed violently over wages, hours and working conditions. 



Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis published anti-union editorials and formed an organization that intimidated local businesses from hiring union labor.

The International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, a national union headquartered in Indianapolis, was determined to unionize the workers in Los Angeles. They often resorted to violent measures, bombing upward of 70 factories, bridges and railroad tracks between 1907 and 1911. The dynamite explosions were set off at times when people would not be in harm's way, and there were no deaths and few injuries reported before 1910. But that was all about to change.

Soon after 1:00 a.m. on Oct. 1, 1910, 16 sticks of dynamite went off in the Los Angeles Times building. They hit a natural gas line, creating a fire that engulfed the three-story building and caused the second story to collapse into the first.

Today is the 75th birthday of beloved actress and singer Julie Andrews. Some interesting tidbits from our article: Andrews took the role of Mary Poppins only after losing the role of Eliza in My Fair Lady to Audrey Hepburn. The role gave her a Best Actress Oscar in her screen debut.

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

The Importance of Great Educators, Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark E. Moran
Founder & CEO

This September 11, Forget the Mosque, Remember the Love

As the 9th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the big story in the news is about the vitriol surrounding a mosque that may be built several blocks away from Ground Zero. I don't care to wade into that discussion, which sadly has become another game of political football. And how I wish the media would show any news judgment at all, and stop mollifying the hateful attention-seeker who says he's going to burn a book.

Because each year, as September 11 approaches, all I want to remember is the love:

• the love shown by thousands of rescue workers and ordinary citizens, in NYC, Washington, D.C. and on Flight 93, when they knowingly put their lives at grave risk so that others may live;

• the love expressed by the many victims who lived for a desperate hour or more after their fate was sealed, and used the last precious minutes of their lives to call loved ones; all that mattered at the end was the love they had created along the way;

• the love expressed by victims’ family members, many of whom spent weeks desperately touring hospitals throughout the NYC metro area, hoping that their loved ones had miraculously been spared;

• and the love for fellow man that I witnessed when I emerged from my office building in midtown Manhattan in early afternoon, and indeed throughout America and much of the rest of the world, for months afterward.

For those of us in New York, that day and the weeks after were indescribable, almost beyond comprehension. Like the rest of the world, we watched the events unfold in horror. But our horror was personal; on my way home, all I knew was that many people I knew had died that day, but not how many or who. But in most cases, definitive word never came; we simply learned to accept that many people we knew went to work that day and never came home.

Many of us vowed that day that our outlook would be forever changed - that we'd hold our loved ones closer and longer, that we'd be more patient and compassionate with strangers, and less driven and harried, than we were on 9/10.

Each September 11 is a chance to remember those vows.

This weekend, I will think about the manner in which so many people responded to the certain end of their lives by calling their loved ones. Though I won’t be imperiled myself, I will call or email my loved ones that I have been meaning to get back in touch with.

I will also recall how the heroes of 9/11 and the ensuing years saved us, in the words of my wise aunt,

“from having that day be remembered as one of being simply victims, totally demoralized....and turned the story into one of great pride in our values as a country and in the bravery and devotion to duty that our people can show.”

And I will beam with great pride about our values as a country, and in the bravery and devotion to duty that our people can show.

And recalling the timeless words of firefighter Mike Moran, who in October 2001 declared that his brother and his many close friends and crew-mates who perished “are not gone, because they are not forgotten,” I will recall all of those ordinary people who perished that day while lovingly doing remarkable things, so that others may live.

As Bruce Springsteen sang to them in "Into the Fire:"

May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love

May your love give us love

Mark Moran

Founder & CEO

Assassins and Their Fatal Fictions - A Common Thread Through History

Today's "On This Day" covers the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. He was killed by Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist son of Polish immigrants who took "class warfare" to an extreme. He later said “I killed President McKinley because I done my duty.” I didn’t believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none.”

Our  "On This Day" for July 2 contained several fascinating, little-known facts about the assassination of President Garfield. The defense asserted by assassin Charles Guiteau at his trial: “Some of these days instead of saying ‘Guiteau the assassin’, they will say ‘Guiteau the patriot.’”

The beliefs of Czolgosz and Guiteau are hardly exceptional as assassins go. Self-delusion of a noble, heroic purpose is a common thread connecting murderous lone actors of history.

What convinces an assassin that he’s a national hero? How does one man, out of so many millions who might share similar political beliefs and passions, conclude that it is his destiny to commit murder for the greater good?

Guiteau defended his action as “a political necessity,” and was so confident of general approbation that he instructed General William Tecumseh Sherman, “I am going to the Jail. Please order out your troops and take possession of the Jail at once.”

Our “On This Day” about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln reveals a similar theme, as John Wilkes Booth was shocked at the public’s grief and failure to applaud the murder. His letters provide disturbing insight into his motivations, such as this excerpt printed by the New York Times: “When a country like this spurns justice from her side, She forfeits the allegiance of every honest freeman, and should leave him untrammeled by any fealty soever, to act, as his conscience may approve.”

The 2009 assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller once again echoed this same sad, deluded tale. Although many tried to link the murder to the heated rhetoric of our cable news culture, only one man translated this passion into violence.

FindingDulcinea Senior Writer Shannon Firth analyzed Tiller's murder and explored the motives of assassins, detailing the three types categorized by author Kris Hollington. There are “wolves,” who seek notoriety, “jackals,” who are hired hands, and finally “foxes,” who are “novices hoping to make a political statement.”

According to Hollington, these foxes are intensely passionate, but are also “ordinary, unremarkable people, often failures: the antithesis of the men and women they try to kill.” Although they justify their actions in political and often religious language, “it’s all within the troubled mind of the lone individual… almost a movie in their mind.”

Do their personal failures, then, prod them towards an alternate reality, in which they can play the film-star heroes? John Hinckley, Jr., possibly inspired by the movie Taxi Driver, believed that by shooting Ronald Reagan he could win the love of actress Jodie Foster. He later explained himself, according to PBS, with this rumination on fiction: “The line dividing life and art can be invisible. After seeing enough hypnotizing movies and reading enough magical books, a fantasy life develops which can either be harmless or quite dangerous.”

I suppose heroism, and even history, is always something of a fiction, a combination of reality and the myths built around it. But I can’t stop wondering what it takes to push an individual into a myth so fatal, so extreme, and so disconnected from the society he believes he is saving.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

"All of a Sudden This Thing Came to Me"

During the 2008 Presidential primaries, we published an article asking whether traditional political rhetoric is a declining art.  We analyzed several view points, and provided historical context by harkening back to a few of the finer political speeches in recent American history.

In a separate blog post, I recalled the sad spectacle of our political leaders reading the Gettysburg address at the first anniversary observance of 9/11. A Newsday columnist wrote that the"appropriation of a distant generation's tragedy strikes me as lame and uninspired"and asked why George Pataki wouldn't "offer a new Gettysburg address instead, one that he crafts himself from the heart and not from a hired speechwriter?"

I then concluded that the problem with political oratory today is that it is always so calculating, so negotiated, so cowardly. I recalled that when Ronald Reagan first met with Mikhail Gorbachev at a Geneva chateau, Reagan's team carefully planned every move. Gorbachev's limousine would pull up and Reagan would stand regally at the top of the steps, forcing Gorbachev to ascend while looking up at Reagan. When Gorbachev's car stopped and no one exited it for a minute, Reagan bounded down the stairs, helped Gorbachev from the car, and slipped his hand under Gorbachev's arm to support him up the steps.  A Soviet aide later said "I left like we lost the game during the first movement...We started with the wrong move."

I realized that is what I really miss - politicians who are willing to suddenly bound down the stairs.

Today's On This Day covers the "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall in 1963. We developed the On This Day series because, no matter how well I think I know about an event in history, I learn something profound from nearly every article we publish in this series. And today I learned that nowhere in the manuscript King carried with him to the podium that day did it say "I Have a Dream."

King dutifully recited the first part of the prepared speech, but then "all of a sudden this thing came to me that. … I’d used many times before. … ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here. … I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”

Clarence B. Jones, who drafted the original script of the speech, asked in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, "What could possibly motivate a man standing before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, with television cameras beaming his every move and a cluster of microphones tracing his every word, to abandon the prepared text of his speech and begin riffing on a theme that he had used previously without generating much enthusiasm from listeners?"

We'll never know how the public may have reacted to the original draft of the speech. But I'm willing to bet that, had King continued to recite it, our On This Day today would be about an event other than a speech he gave 47 years ago today. And the civil rights movement itself may not have accomplished nearly as much as it did.

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The On This Day articles that we publish each day explain an historical event, what led up to it, what happened that day, and the long-term recriminations and echoes in history. We also publish it in Spanish, as Hoy en la Historia. We hope you'll encourage your students to elevate their research and critical thinking skills in our On This Day Challenge, which offers them step-by-step instruction, prizes, and a chance to be published.

Students need role models, right? We've written thousands of headline articles; high school librarian Joyce Valenza wrote on her School Library Journal blog that our "discoveries are  timely and seem to continually attack those topics my students research." We find additional background or reference information on the topic, related topics and opposing points of view. We integrate all this information into a cohesive, comprehensive look at the topic, and link to our sources, which we align in a single box.

When Iran violently suppressed protests last year, we wrote about the History of Iranian Revolutions. When a killer whale tragically drowned a Sea World trainer, leading to calls for its release into the wild, our article about it summarized and linked to a PBS documentary that provided a chart discussing all 133 killer whales that had ever been captured in the wild for use in shows, and an intriguing story about killer whales who cooperated with Pacific Island villagers to trap, kill and mutually share other whales. For other examples of how we help social studies teachers teach students to think for themselves about what we call the "fragile truth of history," read this blog post.

A white paper released in November 2010 by Temple University Media Education Professor Renee Hobbs, sponsored by The Knight Commission, included Beyond the Headlines in its "Portraits of Success: Powerful Voices for Kids" and wrote, "Finding Dulcinea... addresses the 'context deficit' that occurs with online searching."

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

Because our content is so vast and voluminous, we've created special collections pages. Teachers often tell us that students all want to write about the same events and people, year after year; Jackie and Rosa for African-American History Month; Eleanor, Florence, Betsy and Oprah for Women's History Month; Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa for Global Studies. SweetSearch Biographies is an indexed collection of more than 1,000 biographies, sortable by profession, gender, and race/origin. Students using this will soon be teaching you about people you've never heard of. After a librarian told us that students all write about the same events and people from the Holocaust, we created this collection of Holocaust material as the antidote.

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

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

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

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

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

Please send me feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. on our Social Studies content and tools, to [email protected]

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

Educators Will Create the Successor to Textbooks

This summer, The New York Times featured yet another article on how to replace textbooks. Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, estimated that the U.S. education system spends $8-$15 billion per year on text books. One study claims that only 11% of this expenditure actually goes to creating content. Of course, printing, distributing and disposing of textbooks also comes at an enormous environmental cost.

The primary alternatives discussed in the NYT article are open-sourced, digital textbooks that can be customized by an educator.

But while the successors to textbooks surely will be digital, they won't be a textbook at all:

• They won't be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year's Texas controversy;
• "chapters" won't reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of educators; 
• in subjective areas, they won't require students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and
• they won't impose a "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who, in the words of John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter (Iowa) Schools, collectively decide that no one should have "ownership" over what is taught in schools.

There are a number of approaches that could render a product that meets the above objectives. However:

• A Wiki that is subject to the whims of a narrow band of editors with a lot of time to devote to winning ideological battles would preclude the involvement of the contributors with the most to offer;
• a "silo" approach to publishing, where educators post work only on their own school sites, will inhibit the collaboration necessary to develop depth, breadth and scale quickly; and
• there must be some central administration to continually enhance the solution in response to educator feedback.

At the recent Techonomy Conference, Bill Gates predicted that in five years, the best college education will come from the Web. But in many subjects, innovative educators are already using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. Thousands of teachers and librarians around the world are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. These teachers are also creating lesson plans and assignments that test students' critical thinking and relevant communication skills, rather than prepare them to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. And they teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life, and not a textbook that will soon join a landfill.

Many of these educators post their assignments on the Web; often on a school Web site, sometimes on a blog or other platform. This spring, when my daughter and her friends became concerned one of their  teachers wasn't adequately preparing them for an Advanced Placement Exam, they sought out materials on the Web, and eventually settled on a teacher in Northern Virginia as having the best exam prep materials. Everyone in my daughter's group passed the exam, while several of their classmates did not. I recently learned about a remarkable site for teachers and students of English created by Sandra Effinger; I foresee AP test takers from all over the country accessing her resources in coming years; here is a similar site for high school psychology.

The number of sites like the ones offered by these two educators will grow exponentially in coming years. What is needed is a central repository that collects many of them, so that teachers can access assignments created by other teachers, and learn from, and build on them. And if that repository was also one that made it easy for teachers to find great resources in the first place, and provided a free mechanism for sharing the resources and assignments with their students and colleagues, well, all the better. And if it promised a whole host of new features in the near future? It could very well become the successor to textbooks.

And that is what our free product, findingEducation, offers. It's in Alpha stage, and we can do a lot to make it better, but in its current form, the potential for it is clear. Its back-end is powered by SweetSearch and the content of findingDulcinea to help educators easily find the best online resources about any subject. Its My Library enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, and then share them with students on their assignment page. It combines assignment management and quality resource discovery into a “digital classroom.” Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, with their own look and feel.

The ultimate value in findingEducation comes when it becomes heavily used by outstanding educators. For example, once hundreds, or thousands, of U.S. History teachers create assignments for, and provide links to materials about, the U.S Civil War, then a new teacher entering the fray can create a new assignment that synthesizes the best of the predecessor works. Teachers can identify other teachers who consistently create outstanding assignments, and use them as a model for their own.

What will it take for findingEducation to create a critical mass that will turn it into a "must use" tool? Sponsorship by a large education entity or organization that will encourage use by a substantial number of members. We can even create a separate file for these organizations to co-brand the offering and make it easy for members of the organization to find each other's work. Organizations such as AASA, NSSSA, NCSS, and ALA should have a keen interest in discussing this possibility with us, as should state and regional education departments.

We have a number of modules and additional features that can be introduced into findingEducation once it develops a meaningful user base.

For more information on findingEducation:

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

Take our site tour.

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

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

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.