Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Day 4: Cite This For Me

WEBSITE  Cite This For Me
AUDIENCE ↬ teachers & students

WHY I USE THIS EXTENSION  to easily, quickly, and accurately cite sources on the web. Where was this when I was in college?!?!

I recently had a discussion with another teacher regarding students and citations. Which citation do we teach? How do we teach it? At what age? And so on. Here's my opinion ... bottom line, we NEED to teach students TO cite. I do not believe there is a "right" way - MLA, APA, Harvard, Chicago, etc ... pick which ever you prefer.

From a young age, students need to be taught they can't just take anything off the internet and include it in their work. (I honestly do NOT believe students have the malicious intention of passing someones work off as theirs, it's just easy to do. Copy and paste, right?) But how to do this without wanting to pull your hair out? Cite This for Me extension is the answer!

HOW I USE THIS EXTENSION  If I am working with a group of students, having this extension is really awesome because the stress of creating a perfect citation is gone. Once a student is on the website they are using in their work, click on the extension, select the style of citation format needed. From here, it's as simple as grabbing the citation and dragging it over to the document and drop it right on the page. Done.

When I show this extension to teachers, the reaction is half-disbelief and half-excitement. I always smile really big and say, "Man! Where was this in college!?!? I sweated over citations and I never got them right!" This also demonstrates a subtle shift for us as teachers ... there are some things we can "let go of" without really losing anything. Spend that energy teaching students better searching or crafting a better paragraph or finding another creative way to display their work.

I hope I've convinced you to give the Cite This for Me extension a try! If this extension is exciting you, be sure to check out the others on my blog, "7 Days of Extensions You Can Do".

Have a question or comment? Feel free to comment below, reach out to me on Twitter @kiefersj, or email me at sarah@techyoucando.com.

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