Fun with Citations

On last night's PD in Your PJs Webinar, we shared a variety of citation resources for students. With all the available information that is out there for students, it is important for them to know how to evaluate the information and cite their sources whether that be for print or images. And it's never too early for a student to begin practicing and learning these skills.

Citation Extensions from the Chrome Web Store

• Cite This For Me (Free)
• Apogee
• EasyBib

Photos for Students

• Pics4Learning - The photos can be saved to Google Drive and a citation can be found beside all photos.
• EduPic Graphical Resource: Free Photographs and Graphics for Education - Website is done by William Vann, a photographer and teacher. Teachers and students can use all images without permission. 
• Unsplash - Not for those under 13. No attributions are needed. There is an add-on for Unsplash in Google Slides. 

Citations are also made easy with the Explore feature in Google Docs. Click Tools>Explore.

If you missed our guest PD in Your PJs Presenters Mrs. Grover from Lee Middle School and Mrs. Hogg from Central High School, you can watch the recording on our Instructional Technology Website. With all the resources they shared (and citations are included in many of the resources) this should be the first place students go for quality information. 

If you and your students have other citation tools that you use, please share those by adding them to the comment box below. 

Repost: Critical Thinking Skills with Google Trends

GOOGLE TRENDS

Google Trends is a search tool that allows teachers and students to see how often specific keywords, subjects, and phrases are being searched on Google around the world for a specific period time. The data is shown using visual graphics, charts and tables. Users are then able to see and compare trends(what's being searched). Trends can also be broken down in to categories. 

Google Trend is the perfect tool to spark discussion in the classroom and have student use their critical thinking skills. For example, simply ask students "iPads or Chromebooks? Which do you think is used more as a learning tool?" Go to Google Trends, type the keywords in the search boxes, use the category feature to keep breaking down the comparison, click enter, and a great visual will populate. Discuss. Infer. Predict.  Here's an example:

*This shows worldwide

*This shows for the US. 

*This shows for Texas. 

And underneath these graphs are even more visual charts and graphs leading to more discussion, questions, and research. I didn't include them here due to space. 

If you don't want to create your own, you can always use, explore, and interact with the google trend graphs and charts already created on the site. 

Use Google Trend in the classroom to...

• Interpret Results
• Analyze Data
• Find Patterns
• Make Hyphotheses
• Predict Future Trends
• Encourage further Questioning and Research

I'm curious to see how you and your students will use this tool. I look forward to seeing your comments and reading about your experiences.