Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

This “The Best…” list is sort of a combination of two lists I had been thinking of making to go along with The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism (Another list to keep in mind might be The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners — 2008).

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt that a list of engaging (and even fun) sites to teach research skills and accessible citation resources would make a good combination.

Since a graduation requirement in our district is that seniors need to develop a “Senior Project,” I’ve spent some time finding these kinds of helpful sites that might be accessible to English Language Learners.  I have to say, though, that these sites (except for the first one) would probably only be accessible to more advanced ELL’s.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning Research And Citation Skills:

LEARNING RESEARCH SKILLS:

Here’s the one resource that’s probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. It’s called How To Do Research, and its from the Kentucky Virtual Library. It’s designed to look like an interactive board game.

The Information Literacy Game comes from the University of North Carolina. It’s an online game designed to help students develop research and citation skills.

Adventures In Library Research comes from Lycoming College. It was created to teach students how to navigate successfully around library resources.

Students learn some Internet research skills through playing The Gold Rush Game. The group that created this game, 21st Century Information Fluency, has also developed quite a few other interactives designed to help students learn about using the Web for research, including The Internet Search Challenge, the Keyword Challenge, and even more challenges. All of these are accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.

Carnegie Mellon has two games related to research and libraries — “I’ll Get It” and “Within Range”.

The St. Joseph School Library has a large number of surprising accessible games related to research.  This site might be accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.

Boolify is a search engine designed for elementary and middle school students that is accessible to English Language Learners. I think there are others that are more accessible, but this is a good one to help teach basic search strategies.  It’s on  The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2008 list.

The City University of New York has an excellent series of exercises on actually writing a research paper.

The Rutgers Research Information Online Tutorial is an excellent interactive tool to help students learn research schools. Closed-captioning is also provided, which helps English Language Learners. It’s still a bit advanced, but is worth a look.

CITATIONS:

Fairfield University has a good tutorial on Using Citations. It’s followed by a quiz.

Eastern Washington University also has a good tutorial on Citing Your Sources.

Here are several sites that will correctly format citations once you input the necessary information:

Ottobib
Citation Machine
Bibme
EasyBib
MLA Citation Generator
OSLIS Citation Maker
Knight Cite

Suggestions are always welcome.

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