Monday, February 4, 2013

Skype

Do you Skype?  My husband and I have used Skype over the last few years to help us stay in touch with our college-aged kids and our German friends.  I think it's Bill's favorite technology.


I was excited to see that teachers are now bringing Skype into the classroom.  Kate Messner has a site that maintains a list of authors who will Skype with classrooms and book clubs for FREE.



You can also connect to classrooms through Skype.  Skype in the Classroom matches classrooms up with experts.  Best part - it's free!  Here's how Skype describes it, a video, and the link for the site.
"A free and easy way for teachers to open up their classroom. Meet new people, talk to experts, share ideas and create amazing learning experiences with teachers from around the world."

The possibilities are endless.  Language, culture, science, you name it.  It can be brought into your classroom.  Now that's innovative teaching!


Sunday, February 3, 2013

Son of Citation Machine

I have never met a person who loved typing up a bibliography page.  Have you?  I think not.  But it's necessary, because learning how to properly cite a source is important.  Just as we should pay musicians for their work, we should cite our written sources for their creative and diligent work.  It's only fair.

Having said that, teaching the proper writing of a bibliography is no day in the park.  However, thanks to Son of Citation Machine, there's now an easier way to construct a proper bibliography.  Now it won't do everything for you.  For instance, you will still have to put the citations in alphabetical order.  You will have to sort out the font size and font style. You will still have to indent it properly.  You will have to enter all the information into the site questionnaire.  But if you do all of these things, Citation Machine, will make it easier for you to produce a bibliography that is properly italicized, underlined, capitalized, bolded, and punctuated.

All three of my children plus one of my exchange students have used Citation Machine successfully during their college experience.  That means it has been tested by our family at The Culinary Institute of America, James Madison University, George Mason University and Princeton University.  All four of them received quite a few As on their papers.  That means some pretty sophisticated and intelligent professors were pleased with the results.

Son of Citation Machine offers four formats: MLA, APA, Turabian, and Chicago.  It also has a nice feature called ISBN/Web Lookup.  My daughter loves this feature.  It works with MLA and APA.  We use MLA at our school, so I'm planning on adding this to my lesson.

If you have to write a paper that requires a citation, I hope you'll try this site.  Trust me, it will help.  It won't make it fun, but it will help.

Son of Citation Machine