This week, I have been focusing my efforts primarily on the 2nd part of my project, the adoption of Zotero in the public high school as a tool for bibliographic research and as a tool for collaborative research.
One of the things that has become immediately apparent as I've been researching how different institutions have adopted Zotero is that I have been able to find very little information about the use of Zotero or similar proprietary applications such as and note in the K-12 setting. As I've been looking at some of the users guides both at the Zotero organization site and at other sites, one of my 1st impressions is that these guides really have limited utility for K-12 teachers and students. That is to say, that many of the instructional guides that are appropriate in the university setting seem to be somewhat confusing when transferred to the K-12 environment.
One of the steps that I took this week in preparation for my introduction to teachers and students was to let myself be interviewed by one of the editors of the school newspaper and news website. what I did was to provide her a brief demonstration of how Zotero can be used to find and organize bibliographic data as well is to provide a shared library for collaborative efforts. She was quite excited to see this as the school has traditionally required that students who are researching various topics 1st compile stacks of 3 x 5 index cards in order to organize their references. She's in the process now of writing an article about Zotero as a tool that can be of great value to high school students and this article should run in the next online edition of our school newspaper. I expect this will begin to generate more interest among students as well as among teachers.
As I was looking over the “ adopt Zotero documentation” page, I found several of the links to educational institutions were no longer valid. Since I have editor rights, one of the things that I will be doing later today is seeing it this information has moved or if it's been removed altogether in which case I'll either fix the link or delete the link.
One of the institutions that has fairly extensive documentation about the use of Zotero is the Georgia State University Library.
 |
| GSU Library |
On this site is a fairly useful YouTube video that I may be able to incorporate into my own instructional materials for the high school.
From the Zotero.org "Use Cases" page
"Let's say your audience is writing a five-page research paper with five works cited. Zotero's most basic features are likely all they'll need. “See it, Save it, Cite it”. The most obvious way for these students to go about conducting their research is to consult books from their school library. Zotero is compatible with most online catalogs, so you can show them how to use this capability to add items to their library. This can be done by saving selected items from a search or individual items.
Once the items are part of the student's Zotero library, they'll need to cite them. Explain how to set Zotero's default citation style in the Preference window's Export tab. At this point, the easiest way for them to create bibliographies would be to use Zotero's drag-and-drop functionality. Instruct them to simply select the items they wish to cite and drag those items into their word processor. The bibliography should appear, properly formatted with the style they selected earlier. The same can be achieved by using the appropriate keyboard shortcut to cut and paste the bibliography or by right-clicking the items and choosing “Create Bibliography from Selected Item(s)…”.
It's worth encouraging faculty whose students will be using Zotero to employ Smart Bibliographies. This simply means that their online lists of references will be easily readable by Zotero. This is simple to do. The following link should get both you and them started:"
http://www.zotero.org/blog/bibliographies-and-syllabi-just-got-smarter/
Zotero Flyer (pdf)
Zotero Mini Users' Guide (pdf)
No comments:
Post a Comment