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

Michael Ryan is an 11th-grade English teacher at Wilsonville High School in Wilsonville, Ore. He earned his master’s degree in education at the University of Florida and has been teaching for eight years.

When it came time to cover transcendentalism in class, Ryan was looking for a way to truly engage his students and make the material relevant to their lives. The Right Action project was the perfect answer. Developed by his friend and fellow Wilsonville High teacher, Jay Rishel, the Right Action project focuses on the principles of transcendentalism and asks students to make a positive change in their lives or their world.

“The kids LOVE this project, although it’s a test for many of them,” Ryan said. “They see their lives and identities as not being static but something that they have a great deal of control over.”

fE: What aspects of transcendentalism do you cover with your class?

MR: We study Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson and focus on the three principles of the transcendentalists: Unity (”We are part and particle of God and the universe”), Inwardness (”Self-Reliance” in all its forms), and Right Action.

fE: How did the Right Action project come about?

MR: The transcendentalists believed that action was more important than contemplation. The highest form of man was one who 1) accepted oneself as you were, 2) cultivated the observational powers and talents within you, and 3) believed in the self as the highest authority—’trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string’—we know what is right and wrong for us and within us.

So as a fun project, we challenge the students to trust themselves to make a positive change. They can select something that they know needs to be changed in their lives or in their world.

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Photo by Margaret Fox.

Marilyn Johnson was first introduced to libraries in high school, when she worked as a page at the Chardon Public Library in Ohio. She loved climbing into the attic to get back issues of old newspapers, but quit after being refused a nickel-an-hour raise.

Years later she wrote “This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All,” examining and extolling the unseen faces and facets of the library world, and tearing down long-held stereotypes.

“[T]he truth is, with all librarians that I meet, if you think you know what type they are, if you stand there and talk to them for a little while, they’re each spectacularly individual,” Johnson told findingEducation.

Through her profiles of missionary librarians, virtual librarians, specialist librarians, archivists and even anarchist librarians, Johnson proves not only that librarians are each one of a kind, but also that they are truly irreplaceable.

To learn more about Johnson and her work visit her Web sites: This Book Is Overdue and MarilynJohnson.net.

fE: While researching your first book, “The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,” you were consistently drawn to the stories of librarians and found the seed for your next book. Why librarians?

MJ: I read a ton of librarian obituaries, and every one was different. I read about a music librarian who served the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and a British librarian who helped get films online. There was also a librarian who was a sailor on the Maine coast, and she remembered people’s favorite books 50 years after they had come to her library. She was the heart and soul of her community. (Read about more of the librarian obituaries that inspired Johnson.)

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This week, Dulcinea Media launched SweetSearch4Me—a search engine for students in grades K-8.

General commercial search engines aren’t designed for young learners. What may be the best search results for adults are often difficult for young users to understand. A handful of search engines for kids have been on the market for years, but most don’t do nearly enough to ensure that high-quality content written specifically for kids is easy to find.

SweetSearch4Me searches only Web sites that our staff of research experts, librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved as high-quality content appropriate for young users. Only the best sites directed at elementary school students are included, and many of the results on the first page were created exclusively for kids.

Planning to attend the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Denver June 27-30? Visit the Yolink booth to see Mark Moran and Shannon Firth of Dulcinea Media demonstrate how SweetSearch integrates with Yolink, a “find tool” that helps you find the information you would never have found online before.

Mark and Shannon will also be previewing our SweetSearch2Day calendar product, a mash-up of all our content and the best content from around the Web that relates to each day.

We plan to spend the summer further evaluating and fine-tuning SweetSearch4Me results, and will formally release it in September 2010. In the meantime, we’d love to get your feedback. Try your own SweetSearch4Me searches and let us know what you think by e-mailing sweetsearch@dulcineamedia.com.

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Tags: Sites to Bookmark

Ithaca, N.Y., presented its fourth annual Winter Recess from Feb. 12-21, featuring discounted travel for teachers and their family members, according to Budget Travel. Winter Recess may be long gone, but there are plenty of other opportunities for educators to travel frugally this summer.

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Nasser Ishtayeh/AP
Palestinian school children walk past a Palestinian flag at half staff in the West Bank city of Nablus, Tuesday, June 1, 2010.

Recently, Israel and Gaza have been in the headlines following Israel’s raid of ships trying to breach its blockade of the Gaza Strip, Bloomberg reports.

In 2006, the Islamic Hamas movement, regarded as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union and Israel, won parliamentary elections and overthrew the Fatah group loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel placed a blockade on Gaza the following year, and defended its decision by saying it is in “a state of armed conflict” with Hamas, Bloomberg notes.

The blockade has a tremendous impact on the daily lives of those in the region. Palestinians in Gaza must pass through checkpoints, abide by curfews and endure interrogations. For students, these “and other civil liberty violations impede access to classes as well as a conducive learning environment in them,” Stephen Lendman writes for the Palestine Chronicle. Along with items like jam, chocolate and fresh meat, writing implements, notebooks and newspapers are illegal to import, according to Lendman.

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Tags: Schools Around the World

Lee Jin-man/AP

After a visit to South Korea in early 2009, President Barack Obama applauded its education system, noting that students in South Korea attend school for an entire month more than American students. Obama suggested that the U.S. should consider changes to a school calendar, “designed for when America was a nation of farmers,” in order to remain globally competitive, according to The Korea Times.

In 2007, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked South Korea first in reading scores, and fourth in math among all participating countries. According to the BBC, “South Korea has made rapid progress since 2000, says the report—with its pupils improving by the equivalent of a whole school year.”

Yet there are glaring flaws in the South Korean system. In May 2005, teens staged a protest in Seoul after five students were driven to suicide by academic pressures, The New York Times reported.

“Schools are driving us to endless competition, teaching us to step on our friends to succeed,” Shin Ji Hae, a 16-year-old girl, said in a speech before an approving crowd of students. “We are not studying machines. We are just teenagers.”

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Just about every public school teacher can relate: There just aren’t enough learning materials and supplies available in our schools. Ten years ago, one teacher set out to change that by creating DonorsChoose.org, a Web site that matches donors with public school teachers requesting donations for school projects.Though the program started in New York, it has since expanded around the country, first to North Carolina in 2004. According to Matthew E. Milliken, reporting for The Herald-Sun, DonorsChoose.org “has funneled $3.6 million from nearly 19,000 contributors to North Carolina educators.” Across the country, more than 195,000 donors have given almost $47.9 million. Most of the money goes to classroom supplies (41 percent of all requests, Milliken writes), books (27 percent) or technology (22 percent).

In the Durham, N.C., school district, school administrators encourage teachers to try DonorsChoose.org. At J.D. Clement Early College High School in Durham, the Web site helped fund books, calculators, a laptop for a special-needs student and a new rug.

“It’s just been a nice way for us to provide for our students in ways that we couldn’t have before,” Kendra O’Neal-Williams, the principal at J.D. Clement, told The Herald-Sun. “We didn’t have the funds to—nor did the parents have the funds to—purchase this specific technology.”

DonorsChoose.org was started in 2000 by Charles Best, a social studies teacher in a Bronx high school. According to the DonorsChoose.org Web site, Best “sensed that many people would like to help distressed public schools, but were frustrated by a lack of influence over their donations.”Best sought to change that by making a $1 donation just as appreciated and valued as a $100 donation: Regardless of the amount, every donation receives photos of the project it funded, a thank-you letter from the teacher and a report showing how every dollar was spent. In what the organization calls “citizen philanthropy,” every donor receives “the same level of choice, transparency, and feedback that is traditionally reserved for someone who gives millions.”

Choice is integral to DonorsChoose.org’s mission. In a video on YouTube, Best shares the story of one donor who only wanted to contribute money that would support the preservation of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. He explains how he did a keyword search on “salmon” on the DonorsChoose.org Web site and came up with five classroom projects on saving salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

The variety of projects is impressive, making “the ability for a citizen philanthropist to express a really personal passion” and “find classroom project requests matching their passion” one of the organization’s key features, according to Best.

Best isn’t the only one who thinks DonorsChoose.org is worthwhile: Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” is a DonorsChoose.org board member. Colbert hands out $100 “philanthropic gift certificates” to every guest of “The Colbert Report.”

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FindingEducation was delighted to spend some time chatting with Buffy Hamilton, also known as The Unquiet Librarian. We met Buffy after attending her presentation at the Internet@Schools conference in Washington, D.C., in early April. Hamilton has been an educator in the Cherokee County School District, an hour north of Atlanta, Ga., for 18 years, and a librarian for six.

Hamilton talked about the Media 21 project, a collaborative, interdisciplinary project she and her colleague Susan Lester developed in their school. Hamilton examined the impact this project has had on her students. “There’s one student who was in that group that was out of their comfort zone. She didn’t have a lot of confidence [before] and she has just blossomed … Even if you only impact a few students that way, it’s very powerful.”

Hamilton, a frequent speaker, blogger and thought leader, earned her graduate degree at the University of Georgia. She tweets @buffyjhamilton.

fE: What brought you into libraries?

BH: In the beginning of my career, I taught high school English. After seven or eight years, I took a position in our district’s technology services department where I got exposure to a lot of schools and age groups, but I also missed being attached to one school.

Around 2000, I realized that being a librarian would be the perfect marriage of my love of reading and books as well as technology. I’ve been a school librarian a little over six years. People often ask me do I miss being in the classroom. (I actually did teach English classes at night school up until last year.) I love being a classroom teacher but it seems like as a librarian, I’m more able to be a change agent. I can be an avenue for helping teachers introduce inquiry and help them to see that you can address the standards for learning and improve student achievement, without necessarily having to be tied to all those traditional ways of learning. I’m not saying that the traditional ways are bad but you can add to the learning toolbox.

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