Hi folks!  I'll add my two cents.

Our district subscribes to Noodletools.  We love it.  The students like the 4 year old  "quick cite" feature that allows them to paste in pre-formatted citations from databases.  As a result, students see yet another benefit of databases over a Google search.  Projects can be shared with teachers, who can check progress.  Group projects are better, as students can share sources and notes but the teacher can still see who did what. It integrates with Google docs.  The Gale rep just told me that Noodletools will be integrated very soon, while Easy Bib will be removed in "Citation Tools".  I see it as a step toward the more robust tools they'll be using at the college level (such as RefWorks).

As someone else mentioned, Easy Bib does "too much work for the students" but furthermore, it does it incorrectly (no publisher, date, author).  I tell students: Easy Bib is easy but it's incorrect.

Noodletools is also substantially less expensive.  Our district's invoice for this year is $950 for both middle schools and both high schools.  They "threw in" access for elementary students grades 4 and up for free, though I don't think it's being used.  Even after the CLC discount, Easy Bib was much more expensive when this discussion came up a few years ago.

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From: CASL-L [casl-l-bounces@mylist.net] on behalf of Valerie DiLorenzo [vdilorenzo.rumsey@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2016 2:11 PM
To: casl-l@mylist.net
Subject: [CASL-L] research/citation tools--what is your school using?

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

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Valerie DiLorenzo

Library Media Specialist

Rumsey Hall School

201 Romford Road

Washington Depot, CT 06794

http://thelibrarynotes.wordpress.com/

860-868-0535 x122