Diigo - Your Friend for Online Research

I'm not sure who came up with the idea of "Favorites" - probably Microsoft (if not, I'm sure they took credit for it) - but they have been a staple since web browsing really got started.  You go to the same websites a lot; you mark them as favorites.  That way, you don't have to remember the address or go through the great big Google search that led you there in the first place.

Favorites are great.  You can even keep them in folders for organizing, but the Web 2.0 revolution brought about some other challenges.  Favorites needed to be accessed across multiple devices.  It's not enough to be able to get to your favorites from your desktop.  Why can't you have the same list on your tablet, and your laptop, and your other laptop?  Some awesome innovators came up with a way to make that possible - and they coined the term "Social Bookmarking."  

With social bookmarking (through sites like Delicious), people could access their favorite bookmarks from anywhere, and they could even share them with friends.  The people at Diigo, however, have taken social bookmarking to a whole new level.  Imagine a simple toolbar that you can install on all your devices which allows you to not only bookmark, but annotate and highlight information from any website.  The best part - the next time you open that same page, the annotations are saved (on any of your devices).  This means you can take notes on THIS article at your computer at home, and then pull up the article and continue annotating at school.  

Imagine for a moment what this could do for your research paper/project organization.  Take a minute to watch this video to get a great visual of Diigo in action. 

Ebscohost and Gale Database Tips

Research papers are upon us - people are working on them in droves.  Many of you are told by your teachers to use the research databases like Ebscohost and Gale Powersearch.  If you're stuck, here's some tips I put together for one of the English classes.  I hope they help.

1)      To find the databases, click “Research” on the menu of the Library Media Center website. 

2)      There are two main research databases available to you (not including encyclopedias)

a.       Ebscohost - Use the Search box in the middle of the page to search some of the preselected Ebsco Databases or click on the Ebsco logo on the right to choose your own.

                                                               i.      Ask Mr. B. or Mrs. Webb for the password.

                                                             ii.      Ebsco citations are found by clicking on the article title and the clicking “Cite” on the tools menu to the right.  You will get the bibliographic citation for several different style manuals.

b.       Gale – Click on the link that reads “Gale Powersearch” in the table below the search boxes.

                                                               i.      Ask Mr. B. or Mrs. Webb for the password.

                                                             ii.      Gale citations are found at the bottom of any full text article or by clicking “Citation tools” on the menu to the right.

3)      Research databases contain articles written by academic professionals.  Do not expect

Zotero

The worst thing about a research paper is usually finding sources and creating that bibliography or works cited page. Here's a great tool to help you with those pesky citations!

Zotero is a Firefox add-on (which means you can't use it with Internet Explorer, but I think you'll want to download Firefox once you see what it does...if you haven't already joined the Firefox revolution).  Once you've downloaded the program, it's easy to add citation records straight from your browser - there's even one-click functionality from sites like Amazon and Ebscohost.  I can't really describe it with words.   Watch this video to check out what it can do.


(You probably want to maximize this to be able to see it well enough.)