The eighth chapter of the book, “Reading, Writing, and
Literacy 2.0: Teaching with Online Texts, Tools, and Resources, K-8,” discusses
technology across the curriculum. This chapter mentioned many ways to integrate
technology for teachers to use in the classroom, as well as resources for
students to use to help their learning and improve literacy. Two resources were
discussed in the book relating to technology and reliability of the sources.
Two useful sites are www.schrockguide.net/critical-evaluation.html
and www.easybib.com. Kathy Schrock’s
website offers many useful links and information, though I think her site would
benefit more teachers incorporating technology into the literacy curriculum, as
opposed to students, especially the younger grades. I explored this site and
looked at a few of the links that first interested me. The iPads4teaching link
was extremely useful, especially because iPads are becoming more and more
common among young children and used within the classroom. I clicked on the
link called iPads in the Classroom, and the website brought me to a page with
resources for beginning teachers and educators. My only issue with the site is
that every time a link is clicked, a new tab opens up. If I looked at ten
different links, then I would have ten tabs open, which can get confusing and
overwhelming. Overall I will definitely keep this site in mind for when I am a
teacher myself.
EasyBib is a site that I was already familiar with. This
site is much more geared to students. As a high school student and even in
college, I have used this site as an aid for many citations on assignments.
After learning about reliability, and different formats of papers, this site
deals specifically with MLA, this site helps form citations in the correct
formatting. There are usually ads on his website, so you have to be careful not
to click them, but they are not overwhelming. I would not use this site with
young children; however, this site would greatly benefit middle school even up
through college students when citing.
I was first introduced to EasyBib in high school as well. I think that it is important to learn how to cite sources and to give credit to the person(s) who wrote the sources. I think that EasyBib is simple to use, but it is also important to cite sources manually. Filling in information on the website such as the title of the source, author's name and so forth and having it automatically made for you is convenient but it is also important to write out citations yourself.
ReplyDeleteHello Megan, I was also introduced to EasyBib in high school, and I found that it was somewhat accurate, but since MLA is always updating and revision it's versions, It's up to edition 8 now, which is even more specific than before. I think that using citation generators is an interesting tool to use to show how sometimes the internet can be not so helpful, because I used to turn in assignments with copy and pasted citations from EasyBib and they weren't entirely correct! So I have to agree with Melissa, since I think learning how to create a citation manually is more effective in the long run, since it shows the student how to properly format one and not rely on the generator to do it for them.
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