All Aboard for Research Rachel Shankles

Rachel Shankles LIBRARIANS ARE STILL THE BEST OPTION FOR RESEARCH.

Reading Informational Texts Using Our Free Databases EBSCO is our free Traveler magazine and newspaper database. It is updated daily with current event articles. Think of a subject you heard about on TV or radio and search that subject for a current event article World Book Advanced has “Teaching with Documents” and “In the Headlines” sections that can be accessed daily Britannica has “This day in history”, “Britannica Blog”, and “Biography of the Day”

TeachHub.com Writing Prompts Video writing prompts daily Daily feeds of lesson plans and ideas Sign up to receive their info over , twitter links, facebook, etc. Free resource

Techniquesthat Work Give each student a large manila envelope to hold their materials OR require a 3 ring binder for research Have them print out database articles completely- no cut & paste jobs or they will lose the citation at the end; then hole punch and put in binder or staple and put in envelope Print out webpages to put in binder Copy pages from books including title page and verso page- Limit to 10 pages per day per book Student must have all materials printed and with them to take back to class to highlight and write note cards and begin outline, etc. The teacher needs a class set of highlighters, the envelopes, & notecards

Rubric for Finding the Best Info Books in your collection  These days librarians have to insist teachers put print books on their rubric Databases in Traveler  Newspapers that are up to date  Over 250 different Magazines that are up to date Databases you purchase to match your curriculum  Opposing Viewpoints, CLC, Culturegrams, etc., from Gale or Proquest Specific Internet sites (You teach the students to evaluate the credibility)  Restrict websites to sites found within databases as links, or a list you hand out, or restrict to.edu and.gov unless approved by tchr- have parameters

Good Starting Point: Share a Graphic Organizer with the Teacher  Graphic Organizers for Writing rganizersforWriting.html  Many ipad apps like MindMeister, Total Recall- Mind Map, SimpleMind+, Inspiraton Maps Lite, Grafio

Using Books Since all classes may be using the same texts, don’t check out books; rather, put them on a cart so that all may have access. Make copies of the pages for and include the title and verso. ISBN number will be important in citing the book on easybib.com

Working Bib or Works Cited Page  EASYBIB.com is free for MLA citations and has tabs for books, websites, etc.  The students only need to use EASYBIB for websites and books bc Gale and EBSCO use most recent MLA and put premade citations on their pages the kids can copy and paste  Teach them to find the source citation on Gale databases and to find the ‘cite article’ on right menu in EBSCO articles – copy and paste it to blank Word document

For Book Citations For books look for the ISBN number and type it into EASYBIB.com on the book tab. It will pop up a list of books with that title and you select the correct one. Then tell it to create citation and it does all the work. Copy and paste the completed citation from EASYbib.com into the word doc and save this doc and minimize it

Database Citations & EASYBIB  Find the ‘Source Citation’ at the end of the Gale database articles. Copy the entire citation through the period beginning after the words Source Citation.  Paste this under your book citations on the word document you have minimized or saved  You will alphabetize later

Websites (not including Databases) and EASYBIB Go to the beginning webpage for your document Copy the address URL –the complete address—from the address bar Paste this long address into EASYBIB.com It will pop up with some red blanks where it needs further info to cite that webpage; these need to be filled in by going back to the webpage and searching for info like who Produced the page (what organization or college or author) or what is the copyright of the page (go to the very bottom and try to find a date on your website); you may only find the year and no month but that is fine. Enter that info Now select ‘create citation’ It should NOT have any “nd” in it which means no data. Copy the citation and paste it onto your word doc.

Hanging Indent and Alphabetizing MS Word makes it easy

In Word under Paragraph=Hanging indent

Alphabetizing: Highlight your page and click the A to Z icon

Acceptable Internet Use Applies When students are on computers with access to the Internet, they MUST be supervised. The teacher and the librarian should be circulating and making sure students stay on task and do not begin searching Google/Wikipedia as their only source without the knowledge to search correctly. Librarians should collaborate with teachers on expectations before the classes arrive and share information so the students have a good research experience. Common Core requires all classes to do research projects not just English classes so more teachers need help with rubrics and expectations.

Rachel Shankles