Citations for Beginners

EasyBib, the popular citation creation and management tool for students, recently published a new video that could help some students understand why they need to cite the sources of their information. The short video seems to be designed for an elementary school audience although some of the points in the video will require you to clarify and deepen the explanations. Overall, it is a pretty good video even if there is a clear promotional aspect of it.

RefME is Becoming Cite This For Me - Changes to Free Plan Coming

RefME is a great service for organizing your research and creating bibliographies out of your collections of online and offline resources. I've been a supporter of the service since I first tried it a few years ago. It appears that I'm not the only one who likes RefME because it was recently acquired by Chegg. Chegg is rolling RefME into their existing bibliography generator called Cite This For Me.

RefME will become Cite This For Me next week. Starting on March 7th you will have to go to http://www.citethisforme.com/premium/login. As that URL indicates, there is a premium version of Cite This For Me. If you don't purchase the premium version, on June 1st you will access to your existing RefME projects. The free version of Cite This For Me only allows you to store your projects for seven days before they are deleted.

A couple of alternatives to RefME and Cite This For Me are refDot and Easybib (I like the Google Docs Add-on they offer).

EasyBib Student Writing Guides & Google Apps Integration

I recently learned that the popular bibliography creation tool EasyBib offers a student writing guide. The writing guide is well written and easy to navigate. The guide walks students through each step of the research and writing process from locating credible websites to formatting and constructing an APA or MLA bibliography. Many teacher-librarians will be happy to see that the research section of EasyBib's student writing guide is not limited to Google search. The research section includes a list of databases and explanation as to why database research can be better than a Google/ Bing/ Yahoo search.

I also just realized this week that EasyBib has a Google Apps Marketplace application. This app allows you to add EasyBib services to your Google Apps for Education domain (you do have to be a domain manager to add it). The video below has a short overview of the EasyBib Google Apps application.


Applications for Education
EasyBib's student writing guide is one of the better ones that I've seen, but it still won't replace actual instruction by a teacher or teacher-librarian. You should also note that a couple of the guide's screen images need updating as they include a couple of Google search options like Wonder Wheel that are no longer available.

Adding EasyBib to your Google Apps for Education domain could be helpful to students when they're constructing bibliographies. With EasyBib adding to your Google Apps for Education domain your students will be able to access EasyBib and save their work using the same log-in credentials that they use for all other Google Apps for Education services like Google Docs.

EasyBib Comes to the iPhone and iPad

The popular citation generation tool EasyBib recently released a free iPhone and iPad application. Probably the neatest aspect of the EasyBib app is that users can scan a book's or magazine's ISBN barcode to record the information necessary to create a proper citation.  Users can add citations on the app and email those citations to themselves from the app. Just as if you were using the EasyBib website to create properly formatted citations, the app will generate MLA format citations for free. If you want to generate citations in APA or Chicago style you will have to pay for a subscription to the service.

Learn more about the new EasyBib iOS app in the video below.



Applications for Education
I like the promise of the barcode scanning aspect of the app. If it works as promised, it could be a great tool for students to use to make sure they've gotten all the information they need about a they've borrowed from a library before returning it.

If you have never tried EasyBib, it's very popular with the students at my school, here is a brief video introduction to it.

YoLink - Search Refinement and Bookmarking

YoLink is a free service that helps students refine their web searches and easily bookmark their findings in Diigo and EasyBib. YoLink also integrates with Google Docs account so that users can quickly move the content you bookmark in YoLink into a document. YoLink is plug-in for Firefox and Chrome.

The video below shows you how YoLink integrates with Easy Bib.


The video below shows you how YoLink integrates with Google Docs.


Applications for Education
In the video below I talk with Ken Shelton about his use of YoLink with middle school students.