A tool for teaching kids to be discriminating about information from the internet

All About Explorers was developed by a group of teachers to teach students to be critical readers of the content they find on the internet.

All About Explorers is a series of lessons for elementary and junior high students (can be explored by a single or several lessons, or as a webquest) that demonstrates that just because something is out there for the searching does not mean it is worthwhile.

For example, if a student is doing a search for information about Christopher Columbus, typically they will just do a Google search or type something like www.columbus.com. If you click on this link, that is not helpful. Neither is www.columbus.org, which takes you to the Columbus, OH, Chamber of Commerce.

This site carefully takes students through what looks like a typical research project or webquest, and has plenty of opportunities built in for students to make choices and look critically at the information they are finding.

It's easy to use for teachers and students - for teachers wanting to see what is offered, the site is easy to navigate.

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Easy Bibliographies For Students with OttoBib

It seems nary an English class goes by that we don't have to do major battle with our students to include a bibliography - a proper bibliography. One of the major difficulties is getting students to cite works in a standard style. OttoBib is a simple web tool that students can easily use to create bibliographies. No sign in or registration is necessary. The main page has a simple entry box and all you have to do is enter the ISBN(s) of the books you want to cite. You don't have to enter dashes, and if you are entering more than one just separate them with a coma. Best of all, you can choose the citation style you want (MLA, APA, BibTeX, etc.).

When I checked it out, I entered the ISBN's for several books by Ernest Hemingway. You can see my entry below:

I selected the MLA format (the standard), clicked Get Citations and here was my very fast result:

It also creates a permanent url (at the bottom of my result page) that can be bookmarked or jotted down if you want to save it for later.

Why didn't they have this when I was in college???