edutwist.com - teaching and technology

I’m old, I admit it. As an ancient baby boomer, my high school and college memories of creating bibliographies are traumatic because it was such a primitive process: I remember using index cards, library card catalogues, and actually drawing a comma with a pen! The punctuation rules were anal, the order of information was regimented in military fashion, and the preparation of information demanded hours of work. My habit of procrastination and last-minute panic worked against me almost more than the difficulty of the task. I would stall so long to finish writing a paper that by the time I needed to work on the bibliography, I was usually far behind schedule, falling asleep at the dining room table long after midnight, still unfinished, on the morning of the due date.

So when my daughter, a high school student at the time, was able to crank out a research paper in just a couple of carefree hours and still have time to hang with friends at the mall, I suspected blatant plagiarism. She swore innocence, and to prove it, she showed me her secret. She used an online citation generator called easybib.com.

Envy and admiration cast me into a swoon of new love. If only I had access to such a convenient tool back in the day! I explored a variety of other automatic citation generators, such as bibme, citation machine, and noodletools, all of which do the trick, but easybib was my first and most lasting crush. It does it all from start to finish.

Here’s a slideshow tutorial I made to share with students and teachers, showing step-by-step how to use easybib.

Contact me if you’d like the original PowerPoint file, which alllows the slides to build a little at a time so they aren’t so cluttered at first sight. You’re welcome to request the file to tweak for your own use. (There’s a “Contact Me” link near my lovely picture in the sidebar — on some browsers, you’ll need to scroll down to find it).

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Posted on January 17th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized