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Citing Sources

At the Village Elementary School we would like to have our students get into the practice of citing sources.  Even as early as kindergarten we would like them to utilize this process, so it will become second nature whenever they are writing a report, doing a presentation, taking information from a website, book, encyclopedia, etc.

It is important to cite their sources.  Credit needs to be given to the person or persons who created that material.  In other words, you can’t just “steal” their hard work and call it your own.  This is called Plagiarism.

This practice will also help confirm or validate their information.  Others may go to that particular book, website etc. for their own use when doing research.  There, they can make their own judgment on just how to use the information.

When student work is put on our Wiki we require that they cite their source.  It could be as simple as the title of the book, the author and year it was published for the younger grades.  We would like to require a little bit more information from our older students.  Possibly maybe a more formal type of citation (MLA, bibliography, footnotes).

Citation Machine is a great site to use for creating citations.

 To use Citation Machine, simply...

1. Click the citation format you need and then the type of resource you wish to cite,
2. Complete the Web form that appears with information from your source, and
3. Click Make Citations to generate standard bibliographic and in-text citations.
4. Just copy and paste the citation into your project.

 The Citation Machine tool is provided free by David Warlick as a part of his Landmarks for School Project.

***This tool is so simple to use that there shouldn’t be any excuse why something isn’t cited!***

For example:  If students used the book Nature's Children Lemurs for information, this is what the citation would look like:

Kite, Lorien. Natures Children Lemurs. Danbury, Connecticut: Grolier Educational, 1999.

     Another citing source web site I found is called NoodleBib http://www.noodletools.com/tools/index.php.  This one has a few more steps than Citation Machine but is Web based.  Teachers can use Noodlebib starter (you have to sign up for a free account) to show students the elements of a citation.  This tool lets you save your citations so they can easily be copied and pasted into their word documents from any computer anywhere.