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Teacher Review for findingDulcinea

Excellent resource for novice teachers and novice researchers once they learn how to use the site to its potential; however, some may be concerned that this does some of the thinking work that kids need to engage in.

Tara W.
 Media specialist/librarian
Golden Valley High School
Merced, United States
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My Subjects English Language Arts
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My Rating
Learning Scores
Engagement
Pedagogy
Support
My Students Liked It Yes
My Students Learned Yes
I Would Recommend It Yes
Setup Time More than 15 minutes
Great for Homework
Individual
Knowledge gain
Student-driven work
Teacher-led lessons
Great with Advanced learners
ELL
General
Low literacy
Special needs
How I Use It
I would use this product in my teaching in a variety of ways. FindingDulcinea offers various web guides on the website. Of particular value is the guides on determining website credibility. I think that this is such an important skill. A quick glance on my news feed on Facebook shows how often people are fooled by false information on the internet. Other notable guides in various areas point out websites/online periodicals that are credible for various topics (Scientific American for Tech for instance). I also think that the search feature can be really powerful. I am unlikely to use the content produced by the findingDulcinea staff; however, I like how kids can search through various selected sites. My only concern is that I want kids to be able to navigate Google search and not just a website that does the thinking work for this. So I might use this website to save time after I have established that my students have the ability to discern credible versus less than credible websites.
My Take
I tried searching the website for "ebola" in December 2014. The main hits for back were articles from 2008 and 2009. The default search appears to be postings from the findingDulcinea staff. Their content appears to be outdated. However, the site also provides resulted from "selected sites" which are much more recent. A quick glance suggests that from the searching that I did, the website provides links to credible sources such as the NYT, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, NPR, and CNN. However, I tried to search for "ebola transmission" and the website returned zero hits. I realized that I have to change the tab at the top to search findingDulcinea's selected sites instead of just findingDulcinea alone. This could prove to be somewhat troubling in the classroom, but not insurmountable with the proper modeling and demonstration. Overall, I would definitely recommend this as a possible resource for teachers to use in creating lesson plans on research skills. Some teachers might benefit from the fact that the search can be filtered for ALL results versus JUNIOR results. That feature could be huge for teachers of younger students.