Saturday, May 14, 2011

Thing #17 - Research and Reference Tools



1. Student Research

Wow! The Junior edition and the Student edition of Infotrac are excellent databases for scholarly articles for students to use for research. They are similar in layout and are easily searchable. The main difference between them is that the junior edition contains a reduced number of books (only 330) in comparison to the 1100 titles available in the student edition. The junior edition is geared towards middle school and junior high students while the student edition is for high school students. The student edition appears to contain all of the same articles as the junior edition but then also a whole lot more. Since the two editions are so closely related, there should be no trouble for students to make the transition from using the junior edition in middle school to using the student edition in high school.


Infotrac provides students with safe, relevant, and scholarly articles. Since the majority of the articles on Infotrac come from professional journals and other published resources the majority of the information is would be considered useful for citation within a research paper. Furthermore, since the students are searching within a controlled environment while using Infotrac there is little danger of them coming across inappropriate content. Furthermore, while conducting their searches, the majority of the information that they will come across will be useful and helpful to their research. Consequently it will not be necessary for them to filter through a lot of information that is irrelevant as they would with doing an ordinary Google search on their topic of interest.



2. Advanced Research

I decided to conduct a few searches using Academic OneFile by Infotrac. The results were helpful and I was very impressed with the tremendous amount of information that is available through this database. Since the articles and resources that are available through Academic OneFile come from peer-reviewed, professional journals, most of the content is reliable and credible. Although the content is written at college level, it is useful to educators for their own professional development and research.


3. Work Cited - 1 

The ability to make citations directly through MeL is something that was completely new to me. I wonder if this tool was around when I was in college, since it would have saved a lot of time and effort in writing my works cited pages. The fact that MeL generates citations for you is another great reason for using MeL databases for research rather than just browsing the Internet. The citation tool is so easy to use that students should have very little difficulty to put together a well developed list of sources for their research. Below is a screen shot of a citation that I generated through using the citation tool within MeL.



The citation below was generated through the citation tool available within MeL:

Perkins, Sid. "Volcanic hot spots: molten messengers from deep within the earth." Science News 9 July 2005: 24+. Academic OneFile. Web. 23 May 2011.
Document URL:

4. Work Cited - 2
Making a bibliography is so simple with using a tool like BibMe. I wonder why I was not told about tools like this when I was in college. Perhaps these tools were not around or perhaps the professors wanted to keep us ignorant so that we would get experienced at formatting a citation. At any rate, I am glad to now know about this helpful tool.

 
The citation below took seconds to make using using BibMe:
Paton, John Gibson. Thirty years with South Sea cannibals; autobiography of John G. Paton.. Rev. ed. Chicago: Moody Press, 1964. Print.

Content Standards:
Aligned to NETS-T: 1.a, 1.b, 2.a, 2.b, 2.c, 3.a, 3.d, 4.b, 5.c
Connections to Marzano Strategies: Summarizing and Note-taking; Similarities and Differences; Homework and Practice; Generating and Testing Hypothesis

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