Sweet Child o’ Mine
Yes, I am hearing the song “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Guns and Roses. I have the TV on in the background, and apparently this song is in a movie called “The Wrestler” which was just reviewed by Larry King on Larry King Live.
Allrighty, down to brass tacks. I have just reduced the amount of time that I spent researching a topic by using two (free) web tools. The first one is:
- Diigo – This allowed me to read through several web pages and highlight (online) the things that I thought were useful. This saved:
- Time: I didn’t have to write everything out or copy it by hand, and later when I wanted to refer to my notes I was able to look them up through my tags!
- Trees: I didn’t have to print out to save my highlights…
- Space: I can always go back to my highlights, and I don’t have to save them anywhere on my hard drive or in hard copy!!!
- Zotero – In the end I needed to create a bibliography. In general, I regularly have to create bibliographies with two completely different systems: MLA and APA. Zotero will automatically bookmark and generate these bibliographies for you. And, with the simple selection of a dropdown box it will generate the correct bibliography format for you. This is helpful in three ways:
- Saves Time: Zotero can generate a bibliography faster than I can.
- Encourages Better Tracking of Sources: You can easily keep track of web resources with Zotero. At the minimum it requires the press of a button. And, as you are researching, you can manually add other resources as well. If you are in practice of bookmarking all of your web resources, you are more likely to also be more cognizant of capturing other types of resource information (especially since it is so easy to generate a bibliography with all of it in the end).
- Better Bibliographies: You don’t have to think with Zotero. For the different types of sources, it prompts you for the correct information for the bibliography. And, when bibliographies are generated, it does it in the correct format. No more corrections due to bad formatting, missed commas, missed information, etc. Zotero does it for you.
I think that these two tools are essential for efficient research and resource-tracking. I strongly recommend them for teachers and students. They are easy to use and they make life easier!!
