Hi everyone,

I’m desperately seeking some advice from my peers on this. Inspired by everyone’s comments and seeing students at my school sometimes struggle with citation, I talked to a department chairperson at my school thinking they would be interested but instead I was met with almost hostility. The only tool acceptable to this teacher is Purdue Owl. I understand the teacher has had problems with students misusing Easybib and not filling in missing information (which can be done often with a quick referral back to the source), but I never thought suggesting an additional source would cause such an uproar. How do I convince teachers to at least consider alternate citation tools when the chairperson is so against other options? Anyone else have this problem and how did you resolve the issue?

Thanks,

Dawn M. Zillich, librarian

St. Paul Catholic High School

“For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next

year's words await another voice.” ― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

From: CASL-L [mailto:casl-l-bounces+dzillich=spchs.com@mylist.net] On Behalf Of Valerie DiLorenzo
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2016 10:18 AM
To: casl-l@mylist.net
Subject: Re: [CASL-L] research/citation tools--what is your school using?--I'll compile the results

So much excellent, thoughtful feedback (not all of which has gone to whole listserv). I'll compile results and share with all via a Google Doc sometime later today. If you have responded and do NOT want your name included in the compilation, please let me know ASAP. (I'll send the Google doc so that anyone with the link can edit, so you can simply edit as you wish later too.) Should have created a G doc to begin with for people to simply add to!

Thanks all,

~Val

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 2:11 PM, Valerie DiLorenzo <vdilorenzo.rumsey@gmail.com> wrote:

Happy 2016 to All,

Anyone who subscribes to EasyBib School Edition (paid version of EasyBib, not the free one) is aware of the fact that this platform will no longer be available after June 2016. The company "Imagine Easy" has changed to a platform called Scholar.

I have some reservations about simply switching to the Imagine Easy Scholar platform. One big concern is that the Scholar extension (through Google) often creates citations wrong (with major mistakes). It's only as good as the metadata used to create it. After a citation is created, students can then edit it to fix the mistakes.

Though Imagine Easy Scholar works well with the Google platform (this is a plus), in my opinion, Scholar doesn't do as good of a job "teaching" how to evaluate sources or showing how citations are created/built as the EasyBib School Edition platform did. Which brings me to another major concern: even with a discount (44%) for being an EasyBib SE subscriber, the price for Imagine Easy Scholar is three times as much as EasyBib SE.

My question, therefore, is what is everyone else using out there as a research platform to help your students become productive and ethical researchers? In your answer, please include the grade levels you teach.

I've been using EasyBib School Edition with grades 3 - 9 for about 4 years. Before that, we were using NoodleTools with grades 5 - 9. (We made our switch before NoodleTools overhauled their platform.) We made the switch because, at the time, NoodleTools was not working well for our population.

Thank you,

~Valerie

Valerie DiLorenzo

Library Media Specialist

Rumsey Hall School

201 Romford Road

Washington Depot, CT 06794

http://thelibrarynotes.wordpress.com/

860-868-0535 x122