Easy Online Research Process: Finding Resources, Note Taking and Citing Sources

To help teachers and students access research for assessments (essays and presentations), I have been accumulating online articles relating to specific topics.  Teachers in some classes have then given students the link to the post or provided them with a handout that lists each resource and link (or both). Teachers may also choose to link these blog posts to their own websites for students’ easy access.  Lastly, some teachers have printed packets of these articles in a class set.  The following are two example sets:

• Argumentative Essay Resources for the Topic: Is College a Requirement for Success or Not: These resources were gathered for the nine team’s Embedded Assessment 2 essay topic.
• Articles on Modern Cultural Issues for a Synthesis Argumentative Essay: These resources were gathered for the ten team’s Embedded Assessment 2 prompt about the effect of culture on one’s worldview.

As students are reading these electronic resources, they can also use this AWESOME online tool to highlight and save comments on the articles to an account to use later:

• This post, Diigo: An Online Tool to Annotate and Capture the Web, explains how Diigo works and has screen shots with instructions for teachers and students.

Lastly, as students are finding this research, teachers might want to ask them to create a Works Cited page as well.  The online program EasyBib is a quick and easy way to do this.  In three steps, I was prompted to fill in information to create the Works Cited entry for the blog post linked above, which I then cut and pasted here:

Lust, Brandi. “Articles on Modern Cultural Issues for a Synthesis/Argumentative Essay.” Lifelong Learning

            Lab. N.p., 8 Oct. 2014. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.

Students will still need to look for the information in the article, website or book in order to enter it, but the program makes formatting very easy for them to create citations.