I speak with many colleagues and parents during the course of a school year and it's not atypical to hear many of them lament about how "the olds ways were better". PowerPoint works well as an example. PowerPoint is fine and well in the right hands, but students, especially younger students, typically spend more time making their slides look cool than making them instructional.
Citation is another area I sometimes hear the refrain "the old ways were better". You'll pardon me if I try to hold my gag reflex in check. What!?! It's like they've completely forgotten what it was like to assemble those 3x5 note cards listing author (last name first, first name last), title, date of publication, publisher, origin of publication, etc. only to learn that they missed a comma along the way and most likely a point off their final score. Citing research as a youth was the PowerPoint of my day, without all the fun because I spent as much time looking up MLA, APA, and Chicago styles of citation than I did writing my reports.
Today, there are a bevy of ways to cite your work with next to no fuss or muss. One of my favorites is Son of Citation Machine, which uses all of the standards listed above plus Turabin style. (I'm not sure what that is either. Don't sweat it.)
So, say you recently read and researched Seasbiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. (She's also the author of Unbroken, an amazing story of survival.) Using the "old ways were better" approach, you need to pull and properly put together a list of details regarding the book (see list above); and then everything must be correctly ordered and separated with commas. That process takes time and is, frankly, boring. Using Son of Citation Machine, one need only type in the ISBN number of the book and the nifty on-site tool then spits out the following:
Citation is another area I sometimes hear the refrain "the old ways were better". You'll pardon me if I try to hold my gag reflex in check. What!?! It's like they've completely forgotten what it was like to assemble those 3x5 note cards listing author (last name first, first name last), title, date of publication, publisher, origin of publication, etc. only to learn that they missed a comma along the way and most likely a point off their final score. Citing research as a youth was the PowerPoint of my day, without all the fun because I spent as much time looking up MLA, APA, and Chicago styles of citation than I did writing my reports.
Today, there are a bevy of ways to cite your work with next to no fuss or muss. One of my favorites is Son of Citation Machine, which uses all of the standards listed above plus Turabin style. (I'm not sure what that is either. Don't sweat it.)
So, say you recently read and researched Seasbiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. (She's also the author of Unbroken, an amazing story of survival.) Using the "old ways were better" approach, you need to pull and properly put together a list of details regarding the book (see list above); and then everything must be correctly ordered and separated with commas. That process takes time and is, frankly, boring. Using Son of Citation Machine, one need only type in the ISBN number of the book and the nifty on-site tool then spits out the following:
Hillenbrand, Laura, Seabiscuit: An American Legend. New York: Random House, 2001.
Who knew citing something could be so exciting? Son of Citation machine works for almost any conceivable form of researchable material. Want to cite your reading from a magazine article? No problem. A newspaper article? Same. How about an on-line journal article? Easy-peazy. A blog article? OK, not as easy as the previous sources, but doable. By inputting my name (which I can proudly announce I've been spelling well for years), the title of my blog article, the blog site, a date, and then pasting in the URL, you get this:
Lagana, Ralph. "A Solid Case AGAINST the Old Ways ". Reading Teacher (CT)., June 12 2012.,
It's not pretty to look at but it's properly MLA cited. Son of Citation does the really heavy lifting for those who can locate an ISBN number. It's far superior to any of the "old ways" for sure. The website even provides a wonderful rationale for citing -Someday the information that someone else wants to use...will be yours!
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