Online Citation

Do you have your students do research or pull images online and want to teach them that citation is just as important for online material as it is for hard-copy material, but are uncertain as to how that should be done?

Here are some helpful web links that should assist you in teaching your students how to properly cite online material.

 
Merriam-Webster - Very simple










 

 
 Netlingo - Simple and to the point

easybib.com - this seems to be the better one and recommended by other educators; bibliography maker; does the work for you with MLA, APA, and Chicago formats

  
National-Louis University - 7 different types

Religious Tolerance - About 12 different styles and formats

Royal Wedding Pics from Life.com

Life.com offers current event imagery from the best of the best in photography.  These galleries can be embedded right into your Moodle course for students to view even on your front page.  Simply, click on the main photo on their homepage; look for "link to" on the right-side menu; choose either Photo or Gallery; then copy the code that is available.

Place them in a "topic" section or place them in your sidebar as an HTML box.  For more information on how to do this, visit How Do I Embed HTML Code? and Adding HTML To My Moodle Course.  Here is an example below.

Calculus Rhapsody

Here's a great little number featured on a blog I follow, Mathematics and Multimedia.  Hope you like it.

Who Am I?: A History Mystery

Here's a fun activity featured by Richard Byrne dealing with the Civil War.  Who Am I?:  A History Mystery is a mystery-solving activity (great for the SMART Board) from the Smithsonian.  Basically you are given a section of a photograph of an important historical individual during the Civil War for you to guess who they are.  You are, also, given a clue and five artifacts, two of them which are associated with the mystery history figure.  Each of the artifacts have historical information when you click on them.

There appears to be only six individuals - Willie Johnston (Union Drummer Boy), Lewis Douglass (US Colored Troops of America), Dorothea Dix (Union Nurse), John Simpson Crocker (Union Colonel), Bell Boyd (Confederate Spy), Stand Waite (Cherokee Confederate General).

Classroom Connection:  Could be a fun, alternative, SMART Board activity.  It is, however, limiting with only six historical individuals; especially if none of these figures are discussed in the lessons.

What is RSS?

Do you see this symbol ever time you go to a Blog, news site, forum, etc.  This is the icon that allows you to subscribe to the hosts RSS feeds.  What is RSS and what are the benefits of RSS professionally and personally.  There are a couple of different interpretations of this acronym, however this site gives a decent explanation.  Check out Wikipedia's version.

Instead of constantly checking the latest updates on your favorite websites or bookmarking all of their sites, you can collect, organize and manage them through subscriptions in one place.  As you may have read in the above links, in order to collect, organize and manage your subscriptions, you need a Reader that will aggregate these for you.  There are many different ones available for free.  I use Google Reader.  It's easy to use and it's right in my Google account.

Now, what are the benefits?

I have over 50 RSS subscriptions that I can keep tabs on from time to time.  Instead of visiting all of these websites, I go to my Reader and browse through them all for anything that looks interesting to me.  The RSS Reader allows you to categorize using folders and tags.  I have an easily accessable list of all of my feeds to choose from.  I can organize them by date so I see the latest and greatest.  I can mark posts older than a day, a week, or two weeks as "read" to clear any clutter.

Below is a video from CommonCraft that gives a simple explanation of RSS feed and a RSS reader.

Google's Nigeria Election Page

Something that just came out last Thursday, is Google has provided an amazing resource for keeping up on the details of the ongoing election in Nigeria for 2011.  Below is a video explaining how to make the most of it.


Be sure to check out Google's own Africa Blog for more information.

Google Realtime

Google Realtime is one of their Search products that you can find in their left-hand menu column.

I use this tool as an up-to-the-second report of any particular subject, topic, or news feature.  Realtime uses Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, etc social media posts from everywhere around the world.  "How are these social networks going to provide for me anything worth looking at that would be considered news-worthy or for my own serious research", you may be asking.  With this application, I can get instant updates and news not only from news publications, but even from people associated with the news event or person.  If I am keeping up to date with any major event for my students, this is a great tool to help me with that.  I can then keep my students informed.  Each post also provides links to other articles and publications that can provide more useful information and may introduce you to a new favorite news source.  Realtime is live and auto-refreshes, so you will receive any new update as soon as it happens.  It even tells you how long ago the post was updated; in days, hours, minutes, and seconds.  You may want to refresh  your browser periodically if Realtime is kept open for an extended period of time, just to ensure that your live feed is continuous.

You may find that some of the posts become a bit redundant (as anything in society), however you do find some gold nuggets of material.  You can, also, view the Timeline on the right of the Google Realtime page where it will indicate peaks of activity by time.  Click anywhere on the Timeline to go back in time to view past updates where update activity peaks.

The video explains more of Realtime's features and how to customize your Realtime search.

Google Reader

Another great procduct from Google than can save headaches and time.

Do you like to follow Blogs or any news-related web site like CNN or The New York Times?  Do you utilize RSS?  Then Google Reader is right up your ally.

In a nutshell Google Reader collects all of those feeds, news, and updates and organizes (aggregates) them in one location that you can easily manage.  I follow almost 100 blogs, news sites and RSS feeds for information of various kinds.  Instead of bookmarking all of these sites and scrolling and flipping through web pages to find material, I can view and save snippets that lead me to the main articles.  I can sort and manage all of these updates and read the ones that I find pertinent for me.  You can also share your favorites with others.


Another great feature is that I can tie in my Google Alerts.  When I apply for a Google Alert, I have them sent to my Reader, so that I can view and manage them in one place.

For more information on Google Alerts view my post.


For more details visit Google Reader Help

For more information on RSS, please visit my RSS blog post.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great tool to stay in the loop on any current event faster than the morning paper or TV news.  It's a great tool professionally and personally.  Great for Social Studies teachers.

Google's Help explains.

I have been collecting Alerts on Wikileaks, Ai Weiwei (Chinese government detained Artist), and the Government Shutdown.  I have put my Alert settings to send me any kind of news the moment it comes out.  You can, also, set it to send you a daily or weekly digest and you can just set your Alerts for News, Blogs, Realtime, Video or Discussions only.

Google Alerts also can be tracked in your Google Reader, making your news or information flow more directed and in one place.  Google Reader will update for you automatically.  I can now keep my Reader open and toggle back to it to view any new updates.  For more information on how Google Reader makes your news/info/rss/blogs much easier to collect and saves headaches, go to my Google Reader post.