To continue my series about citing sources, I am going to delve into the world of another online cite that assists the writer in the art of citation. (Yes, I call it an art because it takes talent to master the skill. Many of our students are lacking that skill and need to have it drilled and added to their brains more often than once a year. It is a skill that needs to be adapted, utilized and practiced frequently.) My site today is: Easybib.
I learned about Easybib a few years ago when I was teaching a senior project class which involved writing a super intense research paper. I learned about it when I had my iPhone and someone told me to download the app and try it. I did and I loved how it worked. Scan a barcode and get the citation. Easy as that.
I checked the website and found it just as easy to use. It offers the researcher both guides to using a citation as well as offers ways to build the citation page. It is very simple for the researcher.
You merely decide the format *APA, MLA, etc. and plug in the information. It does the work for you. Is it going to teach kids what they need to know? No, but, my thought about this is; who is going to sit down in real life and develop a citation based on the current MLA format? Who is going to read through a guide and go step by step to build it when every database has the entire thing? I wouldn't. If I had some of these wonderful sources to use when I was doing my numerous college papers, I would have absolutely taken advantage of it.
With that being said, Easybib is just that- Easy! It can do a lot to help the research process. I also noticed it adds a special toolbar to Chrome to allow you to tag sites as you access them. Talk about easy!
I love how easy it is, too, but do you find that with your students, especially the younger ones, they tend to get lazy and not use it properly? I am a 6-12 School Librarian and I'm finding that the students use the "plug and click" method of just dropping a website's url into the search and just click ok over and over until they get a citation. Unfortunately, if you do this, the citation is incomplete, often giving you "n.p." and "n.d." even though it is clearly marked on the website. EasyBib is a computer program and it is not "smart" enough to grab these copyright dates and publishers off of the website. I'm now at a point where I have to explicitly teach students how to use EasyBib for them to even use it properly. Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteI think regardless of the tool it has to be taught to them. There are so many tools out there these days that we can't keep up, but, with tools like EasyBib (or any citation site, for that matter) there is an enormous need for training. We have to train them if they do a manual citation be referring to different books and establishing a proper citation.
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