JOSTI Conference 2008

I’m at the JOSTI conference and so far, for me, the sessions have been hit or miss in terms of whether the information is new, review, or over my head. Even in the sessions that are mostly review, I have come away with some new nugget of knowledge that is either helpful for me or will be good for someone on my staff.

Anyway, there are a few applications, utilities, and/or websites that I am pretty excited about so I figure I’ll blog about them before I forget. I’ll start with the one I’m most excited about, Zotero.

From Zotero’s website:
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.
Of course it is essential to properly credit sources when doing research; however, I see no reason for a person to manually format a bibliography when an application can do it for you. Zotero extremely intuitive, particularly for students, because the developers emulated the iTunes interface when creating it. It keeps track of resources and easily creates bibliographies and citations. There is also a plug in for Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer which generates the bibliography and citations, allowing the user to easily switch between different formats (e.g. MLA, APA, etc.).

The only “drawback” is that it only works with Firefox, so if you are married to using Internet Explorer then you’ll be stuck.

So:

1. Download Zotero from www.zotero.org. Follow the instructions and install it in Firefox.
2. Watch the screencast tutorials on the website to get an overview of the interface and its capabilities.
   

I’m thinking this will be helpful for students working on extended essays for IB, personal projects for MYP, the PYP exhibition, students’ investigation stages in MYP technology, science projects, or any project involving multiple resources in research/investigation. Up until now, I’ve encouraged students to use Citation Machine, but Zotero does so much more than this because the information is saved locally and can even make a local copy of a webpage for the student to highlight and have available when offline. That feature is pretty clutch for students who do not have internet at home or for schools in countries where the internet is spotty.

Thanks to http://www.mrbass.org/freeware/firefox/ for the image of the Firefox eating the IE logo.