Bibliography generators

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Kelly Gardiner

It’s always great to show students online bibliography generators when they’re starting research projects at the start of the year. They’re a quick, easy way to record resources as you go and encourage good research practice.

Here are a few generators to help students start the new year on the right foot.

Harvard generator

This site is one of the few bibliography generators that gives you the option of Harvard/Author-date formatting, a system commonly used in schools. Tabs across the top of the page let you choose either print or electronic as the source type.

Harvard generator doesn’t however export references or allow you to save your list so you need to fill in the details and then copy and paste the formatted references into another document.

BibMe

This well known website quickly and easily creates reference lists in MLA, APA, Chicago or Turabian styles. It also lets you search for books and other sources by title, author etc., retrieving catalogue records and using them to auto-generate references for you.

By creating a personal login you can also save your bibliographies online and export them as Rich Text Files (.rtf).

EasyBib

EasyBib allows you to create bibliographies using the MLA system free of charge and like BibMe, uses existing online catalogues to retrieve source information.

You can save your bibliographies by signing up using a Google, Yahoo or even Facebook account and can export your bibliography as a Word document or Google doc.

Zotero

Zotero isn’t strictly a bibliography generator – it’s a complete online referencing system. It lets you store, catalogue, annotate, file and tag references to name just a few of the things it can do.

References can be drawn from Amazon and library catalogues etc. and you can export bibliographies in a broad range of styles and document types. You do however, have to use Zotero in the web browser, Firefox.

By creating a login, you can access your research at any computer with access to the web. Signing up also lets you connect with a community of people using Zotero and share research.

Zotero is a powerful tool and probably only worth introducing to older students or even having a look at whether it would suit your own research.

Some note taking applications like Evernote are now powerful enough to be used in a similar way to Zotero. It’s worth thinking about how some of these tools can empower educators and students to become more effective researchers.

Test your search skills: A Google a day

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Cam Hocking

Whether we like it or not, for many students (and adults) the first step in any research task is to visit Google. There are many great resources that can be used to teach students about creating more specific, powerful searches, such as Google Inside Search which guides you through some advanced search functions.

Once students read these tips, they need some way to apply their knowledge to specific tasks. The website A Google a Day provides a question each day which can be solved using a search engine. A timer runs while you search for the solution, and you can also click on a series of clues which will step you through the search process. For those who are completely stumped, the answer can be provided along with an explanation of how to find it online. The questions can vary in quality, but there are enough good ones in the archive to test out your searching skills. Click the arrows at the bottom of the frame to see previous questions.

Interestingly, one of the problems with the site comes due to its popularity. You’ll often find that when you search for older answers the top results will be pages linking to blogs about A Google a Day. This might lead to a discussion about how search engines like Google actually index the web. One possible solution might be to develop your own questions for students to solve. Have a read through the archive to get some ideas about what works and which questions are less effective.

Future of Education: search literacy

Posted on December 2, 2011 by slvadmin

This Friday at 12pm AEST time, Steve Hargadon will be hosting a panel discussion on search literacy as part of his Future of Education series.

The panel for the session includes Google Search Education Fellow, Tasha Bergson-Michelson and Debbie Abilock, multi-award winning librarian, curriculum advisor and content developer for Noodle tools.

The group will be addressing questions like:

Is everything we need online?
How do you teach students to be resilient in their technology use, especially with web tools constantly changing?
What role to schools play in teaching search literacy skills?

Sessions are run in Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate) so you can ask questions and be involved in the discussion if you’re able to log in at the scheduled time. Otherwise all the sessions are recorded and you can listen to them in your own time.

Future of Education is an interview series which features many significant thinkers from international education and technology communities including the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, Will Richardson and Howard Gardner.

Australian digitised newspapers on Trove

Posted on December 1, 2011 by slvadmin

The National Library of Australia coordinates a number of online projects bringing together resources from institutions all over the country. One of the most powerful of these is Trove’s digitised newspapers.

The database hosts digitised versions of 216 newspapers from all over the country, including the complete Melbourne Argus from 1848-1856 and many regional newspapers. The project was in beta for some time but is now running as part of the broader Trove website.

All newspapers have been digitised in full and have transcripts produced by OCR (Optical character recognition) software. The small errors produced by this process are corrected voluntarily by people using the site. The community correcting the text is doing a great job but encourage students to take part and correct articles if they use them in their research.

As always with newspaper research, dates are everything and the calendar search option is a great way to look at a range of publications but still target a specific date range. You can also search by state or publication title and then refine by date.

An excellent resource for a many subject areas, Trove’s digitised newspaper are well worth a look.

Feedly

Posted on November 30, 2011 by slvadmin

Cameron Hocking, Education Officer at the State Library of Victoria talks about Feedly, an application that lets you view feeds from your Google Reader account in a magazine style interface.

The following screencast looks at how to use Feedly’s main features.

Feedly screencast

Google Verbatim and search tools

Posted on November 17, 2011 by slvadmin

A little reminder about the range of search tools now available on Google, which enable students to search much more actively and in a more targeted fashion. Some of these tools have been around for a while, but Google is always refining and enhancing (and sometimes removing) both the underlying algorithms and the functionality so it’s worth taking another look if you haven’t used these for a while.

Students can explore the search tools in the left hand column on any page of search results. The options include some self-explanatory tools such as Dictionary and Sites with images (handy for homework), but also:

Timeline

This has changed recently, and as of last week you no longer get the graph of event dates (or the News timeline, sadly). Now, the timeline function allows you to refine your search results according to the date of publication or indexing. It does help you sift through results on broad subjects if you are looking for recent announcements, a particular historical event or something published in a particular year.

Verbatim

This new service allows you to search for the exact keywords you want, over-riding Google’s normally helpful attempts to correct your bad spelling or include synonyms and words from the same stem, which can clutter up your results. It still suggests correct spelling, but its default results are those that precisely match your keywords.

Social

This function focuses on search results that have been shared or linked by social and community networks. This is a taste of the future of search, as we move towards search engines placing higher value on web sites shared around between people and, specifically, shared by trusted people – that is, those in our own social networks. If you have a Google or Gmail account and are signed in, your results will include sites that have been shared by you or your friends, or from blogs to which you subscribe in Google Reader. As Google+ expands as a social network, and more people use the Google +1 button, you will see these intertwine with Google search results.

Reading level

Introduced late last year, Reading Level allows you to refine your search results according to very rough reading levels: basic, intermediate and advanced.

There are two ways to do this: either through the menu on the left-hand column, or through Advanced search – look for the little wheel icon in the top right corner of the search page.

Google image search: advanced features

Posted on November 10, 2011 by slvadmin

Most students use Google’s image search but have rarely seen the advanced features of the engine. The advanced search option, which appears to the right of the search bar, lets you limit your search to line drawings, faces, specific colours, size, file type and more.

One example where you could use this feature is if you were looking for an outline of a country. By limiting your search to line drawings, you could very quickly find relevant maps without trawling through every other kind of image.

Google images also lets you drag and drop images from your desk top or other website into the search bar and gives you results for similar images. Google has a video you can watch demonstrating this feature.

Europeana

Posted on October 26, 2011 by slvadmin

Europeana is a repository for thousands of digitised resources from some of Europe’s premier research institutions. Over 1500 institutions have contributed source material and high resolution versions of many items can be downloaded and viewed on the site.

You can also create your own account to save searches, tags and items relevant to your research and contribute to their online community via Twitter and Facebook.

The Europeana blog, curated by a team of researchers, includes information about interesting, hard to find themes running through Europeana’s collections, including recent posts on famous Venetians, Italian painter Caravaggio and art of the First World War.

SLAV conference reflections: Hamish Curry

Posted on October 20, 2011 by slvadmin

Hamish Curry, Education Manager at the State Library of Victoria shares his reflections on Monday’s SLAV conference where he presented on how to create with library data.

About 200 library technicians and assistants arrived at Etihad Stadium on Monday 17th October to hear more on SLAV’s theme of ‘Activate the learning with emerging technologies’.

As always, the SLAV conference engaged us with tools, ideas, resources, and networks. There were a series of great presentations from the likes of Jenny Ashby (Epsom Primary School), Greg Gebhart (Australian Communications and Media Authority), and Camilla Elliott (Mazenod College).

Jenny Ashby took centre stage in the morning to help the audience ‘Activate your 21^st Century Mobile Libraries’. There could have been no better example of this than in her great discussion of ways in which QR (Quick Response) codes could be adapted for and embedded in library practices. As her presentation progressed, with QR Codes displayed on the screen, audience members madly lifted their smart-phones into the air to decode and access the content. My take-away from Jenny’s presentation is how easy it now is to integrate mobile phones into the normal business and learning of the school environment. Some of her great links included:

QR Code generators – Kaywa and Gorillascan

QR Treasure Hunt Generator – Class tools QR treasure hunt generator

After morning tea, Camilla Elliott did an outstanding job filling in for John Pearce, who was a late scratching. With a strong focus on motivating us to learn more about how Google works, Camilla also highlighted some excellent search tools that acted as great educational alternatives to Google, such as Boolify , Sweet Search, and DuckDuckGo.

Greg Gebhart from ACMA woke us all up with some startling realities about young people engaging with social media and various networks online. It was hard not to feel frightened of the online environment and worried about the growing numbers of primary school students participating online without guidance from teachers and parents. Cybersmart provides some useful resources and information to address these concerns, but ultimately it is the challenge of educators and libraries to model and mentor digital citizenship and digital literacy for all students.

The afternoon was a mind-blowing smorgasbord of presentations from Judith Way (Kew High School), Tania Sheko (Whitefriars College), Tony Richards (IT Made Simple), Vincent Trundle (ACMI) and Camilla Elliott. I attended Camilla’s presentation and it was chock-full of great sites and resources around maps. Highlights included NearMap, ScribbleMaps and Google Lit Trips.

My own presentation was titled “I’m a Library Hack!” and aligned with a number of the topics from the other presentations around the use of maps, augmented reality, social media, and library data to help engage and enrich the experiences of teachers and students within the school and online environments. A key focus was the Libraryhack competition run by the National State Libraries of Australasia earlier this year. My presentation is available here.

You can also follow some of the conversation from the day on the Twitter hashtag #slavconf.

Cool tools for students

Posted on September 20, 2011 by slvadmin

Jenny Luca, Teacher Librarian at Toorak College, presents three vodcasts in the Merspi VCE Advantage series, which look at some really useful online tools that can help students with organization, notetaking and presenting their work.

These videos cover the how, what and why of bookmarking using Diigo, notetaking using Evernote and presenting and sharing your work using Slideshare. Great advice and guidance for students and useful for teachers and librarians too!

The vodcasts are available via the VCE Advantage link on the merspi front page, directly from the merspi YouTube channel and through FUSE for all schools – search for them by title.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: Research tools