Online MLA Tools

I'm currently subbing in an English department near me. Just before the winter break, I taught a lesson about how to make an MLA works cited page. When I first started teaching, only six or so years ago, 11th grade English had a min-unit about how to do this. At the end of the unit, students were given various sources to document on as a formal assessment. Today, students have Easy Bib and Citation Machine. In about 30 minutes, I walked students through the book entry for their novel, which included a few idiosyncrasies. Most students now have the ability to create a works cited entry for almost any source. No manual needed, no memorization. The student does still need to double-check formatting and accuracy, but the "heavy lifting" is done for them.

Easier still, when students use articles from research tools like EBSCO and Proquest, they can select which style guide they need to use and the site will generate their works cited entry for them. With a fairly small amount of work on their end, the student has all of the relevant data, in the right format, ready to use almost instantly. I'm of two minds about this.

One side thinks that students are currently able to correctly document their research in an easy and quick manner. These online tools take the guess work out of documentation and reduce the amount of time needed to complete the task. Rather than skipping the assignment, students just have to do a little bit of copying and pasting and they're done!

The other side worries that the limited need to actually learn the type of information needed for documenting your sources will result in a limited understanding of the values and relevance of the publication information. If you don't need to find the date of publication, are you really thinking about the currency of the information? Teaching critical thinking is and has been one of the greatest on-going challenges of the English discipline, but it has been added by the exploration of source documentation.

On a related note, we teach students to document sources because of the importance of intellectual property. We teach students to give credit to the creator of the ideas. Do online tools enhance the value of this lesson or limit it? Food for thought.

Wikispaces as storage

I've recently been contemplating the challenges of working without a laptop at school. While the larger screen, separate mouse, and full-size keyboard of a desktop computer is wonderful, it's hard to beat the portability of a laptop. Although I do have a flash drive and the ability to email myself documents, I wish that I had better access to my files. During a discussion about class websites and storage, a friend reminded me that you can upload and download files via a wiki. Her suggestion was to post class materials on the wikispace that I've already created, which led me to think about using the wiki as a way to make my files more accessible. So, I created a "Documents" page, where I post files that I may want at home or elsewhere. There is much refining to be done, as the comment about posting files for students is also valid. We'll see where things lead....

YouTube & Censorship

A colleague and I spent some time grumbling this week about YouTube and censorship. While there is a lot of content on YouTube that isn't school appropriate, there is also a lot of content that can supplement learning. However, our system is set up so that no one computer has a consistent IP address (no permanent logins to sites like Google Reader). Therefore, my computer can't be granted access to a site that is otherwise blocked. As an emerging Web 2.0 educator, this frustrates me. However, there are enough other things occupying my time, so I have choosen to not explore solutions.

Until today. Thanks to Dana Swier Huff for posting a solution on her blog! There are free, legitamte ways to access the appropriate material, even without work-access to the blocked site.

WIkis in Education

I started using wikis last year, when I stole the idea of wiki book reports from SWC Geek Girl. You can see my ninth grade students' work (of the expected variety in quality) by visiting the AVHS-Omega-English wikispace. This individual/interlinked project went fairly well, while the tenth grade literary group discussion pages where less successful. A blog site would have been a better starting place for the group discussion project. Both sets (9th and 10th) linked their pages to the master index. My current twelfth graders are using a wiki page as a links bulletin board for their individual blogs. The set up was a bit rocky, but it's now helpful for finding each other's thoughts.

I still haven't figured out how to best show my students the ins and outs of the wiki. How much do I, as the teacher, show them versus just cutting them loose to figure it out on their own? I tried setting my senior loose, but they struggled with lost material due to overwriting each other. In the end, the content made it up for everyone to see, but I still feel that there is (as always) finessing to be done with the creation process.