findingDulcinea

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."

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 (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 send feedback on SweetSearch4Me to [email protected] so we can fully launch it with your input in September.

We search for more sites to include in SweetSearch by trolling 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. 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. As 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."

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? 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, so 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 [email protected].

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

When Tragedy Strikes: Social Media Grows Up

When an earthquake struck Haiti earlier this week, people around the world read about the tragedy almost instantly. For many, news of the quake came not from traditional media outlets but from their profile pages on Facebook, or through a tweet from a friend on Twitter.

With phone lines down in most of the country, only those with access to satellite forms of communication, such as Internet-enabled mobile phones, could communicate with the outside world.

Within hours of the earthquake, images, videos and status updates flooded the Web with news about the disaster. People experiencing the quake in Haiti were able to share what was happening with the rest of the world using social media tools, long before volunteers and reporters could make their way to the country.  CNN published many of these updates to its iReport section, and that part of its site saw nearly 1.5 million visitors the day of the quake.

For some victims, social media has proved to be a lifesaver. The Miami Herald reported that many users from outside the country were able to post where they thought loved ones might be trapped, asking for help from anyone who might be in the area. For those trying to locate loved ones, Facebook and Twitter have helped the news spread more quickly than watching TV or reading the newspaper.

Even the rescue teams in Haiti are now heavily reliant on social media tools to communicate with each other. Groups from Canada and the U.S. are using tools such as Skype and Twitter to give each other vital information because phone lines are not working.

Long have social media users been accused of "slacktivism," a term Pete Cashmore of Mashable says refers to the endless posting of messages and online groups that don't achieve much, but allow social media users to feel like they are doing their part. But with the Haiti earthquake, organizations employed a relatively new method of gaining support: asking users to send text message donations that would automatically add a few dollars onto their next phone bill. It has been hugely successful, with the red cross having raised more than $8 million so far.

But even with all the good that social media tools have enabled people to do, not all efforts are safe. Rumors circled on Twitter and other social media sites that JetBlue and American were going to fly volunteers to Haiti for free. This turned out to be untrue. At this time, no airlines are able to fly passengers into Haiti due to congestion and lack of fuel at the airport. Though some airlines are offering frequent flier rewards for members who give monetary donations to the relief effort.

Learn more about Haiti in our blog post from yesterday.

Read how you can help quake relief efforts in this findingDulcinea article.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

All I Need to Know I Learned from Social Media Boot Camp

For a long time I resisted buying into the whole social media hype. Facebook? Why would anyone want to see who my friends are? Twitter. Please. I really don’t care about the Pop-Tart® you ate for breakfast.

Eventually I learned that social media is more than posting photos of your weekend or sharing the contents of your meals. It has a future and if you want your career to have a future, you can either hop on the truck or watch it bounce by with all those (gasp!) happy, chatty strangers.

So I gave in. I opened a Facebook account, then a StumbleUpon account, then Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit. And last Thursday, wonder of wonders, I participated in a thing called Social Media Boot Camp, a generous project designed by Chris Heuer and Howard Greenstein, founders of Social Media Club, who normally charge much more for the advice they give.

As a social media pioneer, I’m not claiming guru status. I’d like to pass on what I learned at the camp from its founders and other savvy advisors:

1. Whether you’re looking to market a Web site, a product or another service, Chris Heuer advised audiences to identify their best customers. “What characteristics define them? Find those characteristics and try to recreate them.”

2. Howard Greenstein, also a founder of SMC and a columnist for Inc., advised the audience to realize we’re working in a “gift economy.” If you learn something valuable or discover a new tool, share it with others. And for journalists and other bloggers, he added, “Find and write great articles that help people.”

3. Dan Zarrella researched the nature of Twitter and explained “How to Get ReTweets.” A tweet is a message you send on Twitter, a retweet is a message that someone else sends and you share with your friends politely, marking the tweet with a "RT" to note it wasn’t your own thought. The most common word seen in retweets is “please,” as in “please retweet.” According to Zarrella, if you want people to share an article you’ve written or discovered, all you have to do is ask.

4. In another discussion group, Larry Aronson and E.B. Moss asked participants, “What can you do to humanize your company?”

They cited the example of charity: water. When Scott Harrison turned 31, he asked all of his friends skip buying presents and donate $31 to help build wells in Africa. As a thank you, he sent them photos of villagers staring at fresh wells with amazed faces. The next year, others took up his cause asking their friends to do the same thing.

5. And lastly, Chris Heuer reminded, “Serve your market.” While it may seem obvious, a lot of people get caught up in meeting their own needs and forget to listen to their customers. “Help people, save time, make money, get more done, be happy, find meaning, connect with others and find greater satisfaction.”

Thanks for reading and good luck putting these suggestions into practice.

Shannon Firth
Senior Writer and former technophobe

Live Blogging Beyond Facebook: How Will Today's Students Use the Web of Tomorrow? | Internet Week NY 2009

Students are at the forefront of a rapidly changing Internet, which is posing significant questions for how universities, Web businesses and employers will adjust. To explore this further, findingDulcinea is hosting and moderating a panel of leading student-focused startups who will discuss how students will find the best information online, how they're tailoring the Web in unique ways to fit their varied interests, how new Web sites will fulfill students’ needs, and ways in which businesses can better serve the 16-22 age group. We’ll also ask for audience participation as we share goals and forecasts for the Internet of the next five years. Our panelists are:

• Ariel Aberg-Riger, Creative Development & Marketing Manager, Fourth Story Media
• Jordan Goldman, Founder and CEO, Unigo
• Kate Hillis, Co-Founder & Partner, NextNext Entertainment, Chat the Planet and Qwidget
• Mark Moran, Founder & CEO, findingDulcinea and SweetSearch, Moderator
• James Rohrbach, Founder & CEO, GulliverGo
• Michael Staton, Founder & CEO, Inigral

Follow the event here, or on our Twitter account. Follow the discussion using the Twitter hashtag #gmfb.

Social Bookmarking at its Most Fun

The second generation of social bookmarking sites is attempting to take the concept of grabbing a link and turning it into something visually appealing, addictive and all-encompassing. While many people swear by the comparatively old-school Delicious and Digg, there is room in these people’s lives—and yours—for other sites.

Current is technically a user-powered cable television station founded by Al Gore, but it also happens to be a social bookmarking Web site and hub for the station where you can watch video, read news items and comment and vote articles up or down, as well as submit your own. The focus, generally speaking, is on issues of public interest and issues that will pique your interest.

We Heart It calls itself a “visual bookmark for everyone.” Users have an eye for elegant imagery on the Web, whether it’s a photograph in a field, the interior of a house, a cute animal or a piece of clothing. Submissions are presented as squares and users can “heart” the selections they fancy and “explore more” to see similar items. (Warning: some items may be considered unsafe for work).

BuzzFeed is a time-bending portal to amusing, gross, and strange (did I say amusing?) items discovered on the Web. BuzzFeed has a staff of curators, but also invites user submissions. Each item comes with a photo or video, a link, user responses and other links on that topic. But you’ll likely never leave the site, so it doesn’t really matter.

Twine claims that it “Understands Your Interests,” and this is certainly an inviting proposition. Test it out by joining communities within the site, such as “Financial and Economic Global Crisis” or “Politics,” browsing the links others have posted and posting your own. You can bookmark items, share them and comment on them, and Twine will recommend items it thinks you’ll like.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Gay Rights in the Mainstream Media, Gay Rights in the Twitter Stream

Rep. Beth Bye of Connecticut holds her marriage license, the first issued to a gay couple in the state, on March 6, 2009. (Photo: George Ruhe/AP)

When Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot in November 2008, gay rights were not yet a mainstream topic. Ironically, when Prop 8 passed, support for gay marriage started to mount. Whereas once homophobia was considered “the last accepted prejudice,” people came out in large numbers to protest the ban, and the media covered it. More states started to push harder for marriage laws. Recently, Iowa and Vermont passed laws in favor of gay marriage, and the District of Columbia council voted to recognize marriage in other states.

Now, the media watch on gay marriage is so tuned in that The New York Times City Room blog published a piece yesterday about N.Y. Gov. David Paterson’s anticipated but unconfirmed plans to introduce a gay marriage bill. Ten years ago, homosexuality was still a taboo topic, but in the past year, most media outlets, and many Americans, take the importance of gay rights as a given.

But perhaps the best example of all was the fast spread of news about the so-called #amazonfail on Twitter. A handful of gay authors found that their books had been reclassified as “adult” on Amazon and therefore could not be found on search. A decade ago, I genuinely believe that those few authors would have been the only ones to know or care about that situation. But this weekend, #amazonfail became the most popular search topic on Twitter.

Amazon decided it was such an emergency that employees were called in on Easter Sunday to fix the problem. The fact that the mistake is being called a PR disaster tells me that somewhere along the way, this country’s attitude toward homosexuality has shifted. No longer is homophobia “the last accepted prejudice.”

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Qwidget: A Better Way to Comment

The comment section on most Web sites is an area of controlled, and sometimes uncontrolled, chaos. The great thing about the Qwidget, the comment widget that we use on all our news articles, is that it's all about conversation, not just commentary. The Qwidget is a project of the company Chat the Planet, which is responsible for critically acclaimed 2007 documentary "Hometown Baghdad."

The Qwidget asks you a question about an aspect of a story or blog post you've just read, as posed by the publisher of the article. You respond "yes," "no," or "maybe," and are then prompted with "Why?" You can then respond at greater length on the issue. As Phil Glockner of Scribkin puts it, “Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness.” After you input your response, you can look at everyone else's comments and respond privately to the people whose answers you're intrigued by. This is a great way to get to know your fellow users, as well as take part in an organized debate online.

The Qwidget calls itself "the conversation starter." Indeed, the Qwidget is worthy of a better description than "comment thread." Threads are easy to lose. But the conversations that happen with the Qwidget aren't. What I like most about it is that it encourages me to read thoroughly. It's not easy to answer a question about an issue like Mexican drug trafficking without having read an article attentively. Learn more about the Qwidget mission here.

Soon we're going to be rolling out the Qwidget in some of our features articles, where we often talk about timely matters that affect you, like the recession. We want to hear more of your opinions and hope to include them in some "people's choice" editions of popular feature articles like "5 Things Worth Spending Money On During the Recession."

Head to any of our news stories to see what Qwidget is like. After you answer your first question, you can create an account in a couple of easy steps!

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development