Citing sources Part 2: Citation machine

I have been requiring students to write papers of some sort for years.  I have required papers in French class, in library media class and in Journalism. All of which have required students to conduct research and develop citations.  The second phase of my Citing Sources series is going to talk about some of the different websites students and teachers can use to cite information. There are many of them out there, but only a few of them are used by myself and staff members at my school so those will be my focus.

Let's start, first of all with Citation Machine.  I have relied on this site for a very long time.  I was introduced to it about 5 years ago by it's developer David Warlick.  I started using it that following semester with my students in Journalism when they wrote their papers about the history of Journalism.

Citation Machine is very simple to use and it covers the basic types of paper styles, MLA, APA, Turabian and Chicago.  It offers users a large amount of sources.  It doesn't take much to get the information needed either.  It even allows the user to plug in the ISBN of a book and choose APA or MLA and voilà, there is the citation.

Yes, using a site like this isn't going to help kids learn how to cite sources on their own, but, it does it correctly.  Some English teachers go through the process, show kids how to do it on their own and then have them check their citations with sites like this.  As a non English teacher, this is the logical way for me to get kids to do their citations.

There is so much available information for kids to access and so many things they can do to make their papers correct.  It's a no brainer!

Next in the series: OWL, the Purdue learning lab to cite sources.