Students—and adults—are often stymied when faced with a research project. It is daunting to determine your question or thesis statement, find the resources you need to answer the question or support the thesis, evaluate the mountains of information that can result, and then synthesize and summarize the relevant information in order to draw a conclusion based on the information. All that before you present the results in a cohesive product that explains the process and the conclusions. It is a lot of work to do research! But you know that.
There are some Web 2.0 tools that can make students’ lives easier when doing research. If you tend to procrastinate or end up with piles of notes or slews of bookmarks, the Research Project Calculator can help you schedule, organize, and manage a research project. It is far more than a "calculator." It offers email reminders, research guidance, and support materials. It doesn’t look very Web 2.0, but it gets the job done.
The Research Project Calculator (RPC) is based on the University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator for undergraduate students. The RPC was created to help secondary students plan for and navigate the research process in an ethical manner, using reliable resources. In addition to providing a timeline, deadlines and reminders, the tool offers a strategy.
The first rule of conducting research is to have a plan and the RPC does this by breaking the process down into the following five steps:
- Question
- Gather
- Conclude
- Communicate
- Evaluate
The beauty is that the five-step approach will serve you not just for academic research, but for all personal and learning-related information problems you confront. The process the steps teach will assist in a job or car search, a health care crisis, or choosing a career. Just about any decision can be broken down into these five steps. Follow them—especially the gather and evaluate steps—and you will find the information you need to make informed decisions.
Citation Tools
Remember that rant about plagiarism in Thing 2? One way to be sure you aren't plagiarizing is to have your citations in order so you can put them in your bibliography and footnotes. An online citation creator helps do this. Note that some teachers think this is the "easy way" and it is, but it is also a tool to be sure you have the information you need for accurate citations. You do need to understand the elements of a citation (author, title, publication date, edition, publisher, page numbers, URL, volume number, etc.) and also which citation format your teacher expects. Remember, you are responsible for the accuracy of the citation in your fianl project. Be sure to check that what these generators produce is right according to a particular style.
Commonly used style manuals include MLA (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association), Chicago Manual of Style, and Turabian, to name a few. When you get to college, you will need to know which your professor expects, too, because different disciplines often use one over another.
Tools to Try
- Son of Citation Machine--Creates citations in each of the four styles listed above for print and non-print sources.
- EasyBib-MLA format only in the free version.
- eTurabian-Turabian citation generator.
- Bibme-Generates all four styles.
Activities
- Play around with the RPC. Set up an email reminder so you can see what you get in the emails. Note that the RPC uses a generic algorithm to calculate due dates—your teachers may have different dates.
- Browse the student resources in the RPC. If you choose “essay” as your report format, you will get different support materials than if you choose “slide presentation.” Note that these schedules/materials can be adapted to other types or presentations. The storyboard tools in slide presentation will work for a video, for example.
- If you have a project coming up, try using the RPC to manage it.
- Try out one or more of the citation tools for a non-print and print source. Were there any errors?
- Would these tools be useful for you?
Blog Prompts
- What features/steps of the RPC did you like? Why?
- How do you think the RPC can help successfully do research?
- What additional resources do you need in order to be successful?
- What do you think of the citation tools? Have you talked about these with your teacher? What style manual do they use at MA?
Remember when we said to fuzz up your pics of recognizable people before you post? Need a way to do that? These online photo editing tools offer this feature and many other fun ways to manipulate your photos. Although not as robust as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, these tools are free, Web-based, easy to use and have some fun features. Also in this Thing are some image generators--add fun to your blog posts (or social network site) or other publications by generating some copyright-free clip art. 
