findingEducation’s Digital Teachers’ LoungeTips and insights from the findingEducation team.

Joyce Valenza in a photo by Jim Graham.

This week, findingEducation spoke with Joyce Valenza, an information specialist and author who manages the Springfield Township High School Library in Erdenheim, Pa. Valenza is also a blogger for School Library Journal, a former tech columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a lecturer on education issues and technology.

Valenza sets the bar exceedingly high for librarians. Inspired by the benchmarks set by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), she recently published “14 Ways K-12 Libraries Can Teach Social Media” (Tech & Learning, 21 Sept. 2009) and her own Manifesto for 21^st Century School Librarians, which calls for librarians to acquire the necessary skills to guide learners in new and emerging information and communications landscapes.

“If you call yourself an information professional, you have to be a professional in the information landscape of your time,” says Valenza.

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Subject: English & Literature, Integrated Technology, Languages, Other
Tags: Educator Profiles

Patrick Sweeney with a model home and blueprints created by his fifth-grade students.

This week findingEducation sat down with Patrick Sweeney, a fifth-grade teacher at Boones Ferry Primary School in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District of Oregon. Sweeney teaches all subjects in his mixed-level, self-contained classroom. How does he keep 27 students with different ability levels engaged and excited about learning while covering the necessary curriculum?

Sweeney is a big proponent of project-based learning and teaming, both within and across grade levels. By bringing interests he’s passionate about into the classroom, and combining them with project-based learning principles, he’s come up with some pretty creative ways to get kids excited about coming to school every day.

fE: What exactly is project-based learning?

PS: Project-based learning is using open-ended projects, usually based off of research, as a model for teaching. You can also define it by what it isn’t. It isn’t where subjects are broken up into sections: Math is taught is in a math class or math block, and literacy is taught separately and technology is taught separately. Project-based learning takes all subjects and integrates them. You’re interconnecting them so that everything seems to have a sense of purpose.

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Subject: Art, Geometry, Integrated Technology, Math, Other, Other Math, Other Science, Science
Tags: Educator Profiles

FindingEducation, an online educator tool, aims to help teachers find the best classroom resources on the Web, and share those resources with their students and colleagues. The tool is backed by findingDulcinea’s hand-selected and professionally edited education resource library.

Use findingEducation to:

• Find the best online education resources, with full access to findingDulcinea’s library of online education content
• Manage all of your links in one easy tool, and organize them by grade, subject or category
• Create and distribute e-assignments for students by accessing links in your collection
• Share best practices, lesson plans, e-assignments and link collections with educators from around the world
• Help the environment by utilizing a paperless digital classroom

Ready to get started? Take a guided video tour of findingEducation to learn more, or visit our FAQ page to have your questions answered. If you still have questions on how to get started with findingEducation, e-mail us at info@findingEducation.com.

Subject: Integrated Technology, Preparation assistance
Tags: welcome

With today’s launch of the On This Day Challenge, findingEducation invited teachers and students to learn how to perform better Internet research and develop critical thinking skills while writing about important events in history.

In August 2008, Mary E. Shacklett asked the question, “Do Kids Have the Right Internet Skills?” for the Web site Internet Evolution. She spoke with Susan Brooks, cofounder of Internet4classrooms, to find an answer.

“Internet skills are like any concept which necessitates student instruction,” Brooks said. “Since these skills are not tested by many states, other areas of instruction that are tested get class-time priority. Because of this issue, many students may not have had direct instruction on how to perform research, and their skills reflect this.”

The On This Day Challenge provides the direct instruction that students need. Through tutorials, students practice their Web research skills and learn how to find reliable information on historical events. Using critical thinking and analysis skills, students then organize their research and write articles that may be featured on findingDulcinea.com.

Each month, a drawing will award a $100 gift card from a national retailer to classes that have submitted at least five articles that month. A grand prize drawing will award a cash prize of $1,000 to a class that has submitted at least 25 articles during the school year.

Get complete On This Day Challenge rules and examples of project submissions.

Subject: History, Integrated Technology, Other, Other History, U.S. Government, U.S. History, World History
Tags: OTD Challenge

Getting to Know Google Better

When using search engines, most educators and students use Google most frequently. There are lots of ways to get to know Google even better, and to apply those skills to your use of other search engines, whose value shouldn’t be underestimated.

The Web site Virtual Technology Teacher is a great place to start learning more about how search engines work. The man behind the site is Jeremy Davis, an instructional technology coordinator based in California who has previously worked as a technology teacher and trainer. He hosts several free videos on his site, including one called “Advanced Google Searching.” You can watch the video in your browser and take advantage of all the nooks and crannies of Google that will help make searching easier and more rewarding.

Alternatives to Google: A Crash Course

In our research at findingDulcinea, our preferred search engine for educational purposes is our very own, SweetSearch, which you can use right from this site. But before we launched SweetSearch, we became converts of a site called Zuula, which allows you to see search results from about a dozen different search engines. Just tab over from one to the next to compare results and uncover links you might not find in your favorite search engines.

We also like what Hakia is doing. Hakia claims to have “invented the categorized search,” and indeed, your search results will be organized into sections, so instead of just seeing all kinds of random links about your search query, you see sections called “Headline News,” “News and Interviews,” “Biography,” and so forth.

More Tips and Resources

The “How Search Engines Work” section of our Guide to Web Search has advice on how to use—and improve your use of—search engines, and links to tutorials and other publications from organizations like the ALA that are catered to students, parents and educators.

Subject: Integrated Technology
Tags: findingdulcinea, google, hakia, search, search engines, sweetsearch, web search, zuula