Mendeley

I wrote about the bibliography tool Zotero a while back and I'm excited to share another promising option in this category called Mendeley. It's a bit misleading to refer to these tools as just bibliography tools since they really allow you to do so much more. When I was a doctoral student I used EndNote to keep track of all the articles, book chapters, websites and other references I uncovered in my research and this was a great help in creating an accurately formatted bibliography for my dissertation. But the downside of a tool like EndNote is that it costs money (boo) and it is confined to just a single machine.

Mendeley is free (yeah) and it allows you to sync your list of references across multiple machines. However, that is just the beginning of the great features available with this amazing tool. Mendeley automatically extracts metadata such as title, author, publication, you know, all that stuff you normally have to type in yourself, and creates a new reference in your library. You can access and manage this library online and across multiple machines. You are also able to share your library with others and invite them to annotate the references in your library. Mendeley also supports full text searching of your articles and you can even capture citations directly from the browser, which is incredibly handy considering how so much of the research we do these days is online. You can even create bibliographies right within Word or Open Office.

I still have that same copy of EndNote I purchased when I first became a doctoral student but I don't think I'll be upgrading it anytime soon. Not with alternative options like Mendeley out there.

Wikipedia for Schools

To say I have been a bit delinquent in my posting to this blog would be an understatement but rather than making excuses for my absence, I'll just get to the posting. I recently read about the Wikipedia Selection for Schools on Kelly Tenkely's exceptional blog, iLearn Technology. This selection of resources from Wikipedia has been pre-screened for accuracy and appropriateness with k-12 students in mind. They boast on the site that the amount of information is equivalent to "a 20 volume encyclopedia". When I first read that I was a little confused and I had to look up the word encyclopedia. Turns out, an encyclopedia is a book and people used to use them to look up information and learn things. Can you imagine that! Alright, enough of my weak attempt at humor.

Along with over 5500 articles the collection of resources has some 34,000 images for students to view. You can browse the content either by a picture-based index (handy for younger students) or a word index. But I haven't even gotten to the best part yet. You can download the entire collection and put it on a DVD so that students can use the site offline if needed. How cool is that? What I really love about this is that students can still get the practice of parsing information from a larger collection of resources, analyzing the various articles and drawing conclusions based on the information they collect but do so in a safe environment tailor made for them. This seems like a great option for those research projects you have planned for your students.

Zotero: The Researchers Best Friend

If you are involved in research of any kind, or if you have students who are required to work on research projects, you may want to check out Zotero. This Firefox extension is an incredibly powerful tool that helps facilitate the process of collecting research online, cataloging articles and other resources, adding notes and annotations to those sources and creating accurately formatted bibliographies that can be inserted directly into your writing. They have a great introductory tutorial you can watch to learn more about this amazing tool.

It is a bit like Google Notebook but Zotero takes things a step further by scaffolding the researcher in the process of organizing information and resources. You can quickly save articles that you find online into different folders based on their content and concentration. A single article can be associated with multiple folders in case it has relevance across different areas. You can add notes, summaries and other information for each resource you save much like in Google Notebook and desktop based tools such as Endnote. When you are all finished with your research you can export a bibliography in any of the major formats/styles and put that directly into your Word document or even Google Docs.

Currently it isn't possible to share or sync your Zotero library across computers so you are limited to working on the same computer but they are piloting Zotero 1.5 Sync, which purports to allow you to sync your data in this fashion and that will definitely make this tool even more user friendly. There are many other interesting upgrades in the works for Zotero 2.0 that include the ability to share your data and collaborate with others and the option to create a RSS feed from your bibliography.

Answers.com

Answers.com is a great reference tool that can add functionality to your website or blog in three easy steps.

1. pick a Answers.com badge
2. enter your name, e-mail and URL
3. grab the code

That's all it takes to add Answers.com to your site or blog. But what, exactly, does that do for you? More importantly is what it does for visitors to your site or blog. Answers.com allows people to double click on any word to get a definition/description complete with links, examples and access to more information on that particular word or topic. It turns your site into a powerful reference tool and lets your users find helpful information without ever having to leave the site. I have Answers.com enabled on this blog as well as my Wiki if you want to see how it works. I see this as being a great tool for teachers to add to their websites and blogs to help students find the information they need easily and quickly.