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on findingEducation and involving learners in research

October 13, 2009




Last March, I posted about findingDulcinea, a human-driven, and very useful tool for locating quality online resources for the classroom. 

A couple of weeks ago, the folks at findingDulcinea introduced findingEducation,

a free tool that serves as a meeting place for educators to share insight and outstanding links, assignments and lesson plans with each other and their students. We have seeded the links library with hundreds of links contributed by the teachers and librarians who created findingDulcinea's Web Guides on education topics, and SweetSearch is available to help find other high quality links. Our hope is that teachers from all over the world come to view findingEducation as their community site, one whose continued development they largely direct.

The findingEducation site offers classroom teachers and teacher librarians: 

-a library of online education content
-tools to manage and organize links by grade, subject or customized categories
-the ability to create e-assignments by pulling together link resources from the teacher's collection
-a system for distributing e-assignments to students and parents
-the potential for a more paperless digital classroom
-a space to share best practices, link collections, lesson plans and e-assignments with educators from around the world

In addition, with a consciousness of the learning process and a 2.0 spirit, findingEducation invites students in to evaluate and select sources--to use their research skills to contribute to the knowledge of the community. Their On This Day Challenge involves students--working independently or in teams--to determine the impact of historical events and to evaluate related sources for how they might be used in history research. 

Not merely an excercise in social bookmarking, the authentic activity challenges students to choose a significant event to research and to create context by organizing, writing and documenting a research article to share with a global audience. 

Articles are published on the teacher's public page on findingEducation. Exceptional entries will be highlighted in the newsletter and on the larger findingDulcinea site and participants are eligible for gift card and grand prize drawings.

Senior Writer, Shannon Firth offers the rationale for this activity:

Essentially what we're doing with the Challenge is giving students the chance to do what we do each day in our jobs. As writers at findingDulcinea, we've researched and published our On This Day series.  We've explored primary documents, discovered incredible images, and read interviews with people who are long dead, and we love sharing what we've learned. Now we're giving students this opportunity. It's a lot of work for 5th to 10th grade students, but we think they are ready. We think they will have fun with the process and at the end they'll have something they'll be proud to share. There will of course be prizes, gift cards, and cash, which I don't want to undersell, but one of the best rewards is being published on the findingDulcinea site with a by-line.

findingEducation offers a variety of tools to support the Challenge:

• On This Day Challenge
• Challenge Press Release
• Challenge FAQ
• Challenge Rules and Regulations
• Challenge Teaching Aids
• How to Write an On This Day Article
• How to Research an On This Day Article
• How to Evaluate Web Sites for an On This Day Article
• How to Cite a Source for an On This Day Article
• findingEducation Home
• Examples of model On This Day articles:
  • On This Day: President Lincoln Delivers Gettysburg Address
  • On This Day: British Troops Burn White House and Capitol
  • On This Day: Treaty of Versailles Signed
  • On This Day: President Roosevelt Approves Japanese-American Internment

For librarians, findingEducation offers the opportunity to validate the importance of critical thinking and research skills--the importance of reaching beyond a one-tool search approach, evaluating and carefully selecting content, organizing, documenting, and communcating knowledge for real purpose.

History teachers will like it too.

Notes:
1. I understand any site's need for publication consistency, but I wonder if the folks at findingEducation might choose to use one of a variety of standard style guides and/or citation generators used by schools and universities. Currently they suggest their own slightly abbreviated format , as well as this warning:

Your teacher may have further instruction on how you cite your sources, and may require a more traditional bibliography instead of this section. Check with your teacher for more information.

On the other hand, perhaps there is value to asking students to adjust to and follow the unique style required by a specific publication.  And perhaps there is some very definite value to further simplifying the attribution process.

2. I am also hoping that learners who do have access to them, will be encouraged to include subscription database content in their documentation, perhaps in a separate section of sources.

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on October 13, 2009 | Comments (5)