Week 6: Online Resources

One of the pages I checked out online was www.easybib.com an online bibliography writer. I thought that it would be a site that my students might benefit from and one that they might already be using on their own. I could definitely see a site like this attracting not only my students but students in general. In one of my classes last semester I remember there being so much confusion as to how a particular source should have been cited. Someone in the class mentioned that they wished there was a place where they could just fill in the information that they needed and it would create the citation for them. Everyone laughed at the idea of not having to go through the trouble of citing information and avoiding the confusion that it can sometimes cause. I think we all laughed because it seemed so far-fetched. I have to admit that I caught myself smiling while filling in the information because it really did fill it all in for me.
The site was well organized because of how easy it was to follow and to insert information. Although I usually felt hat students need to do things raw, meaning on paper, before using technology to assist them, I think this site could be really beneficial for students. It would eliminate the constant review of rules that many students find themselves doing in order to complete their bibliography page. It might even assist them in retaining the information necessary for their bibliography because they would most likely have to fill out the same information consistently if they had over five sources for example. It cites in both MLA and APA formats. It also allows you to type in the information and later click a button that converts it into a Word document, saving the student the trouble of cutting and pasting or copying the information by hand in order to type it into their document. In terms of ease, this site has it all.
The drawback that it has, however, is that it is only free temporarily. To access all of its features, including the choice of APA or MLA style, you have to pay a fee of $7.99 for the year. Although I thought the cost was affordable, I also think that it is unnecessary considering that you’re simply filling in information that gets automatically reconfigured. In general, I’m a skeptical person about paying for internet programs. Though it did make me wonder how long I could continue using the site without paying for it and continue to receive its major benefit, in my opinion, which is the ease that it provides in creating a bibliography. It never booted me out of the page or limited my creation of my bibliography because I wasn’t a member.
I’d also like to mention another website that I found while in search of information for the easybib.com site. Some of you may be familiar with it, but I wasn’t. The site is called www.enotes.com and works along the lines of Cliff notes, a crutch of mine when I took AP English in high school. The site essentially works the same way but has much more interactive information that what any book could offer. It included a longer summary or quick summary of the story, quizzes, analysis, historical content, topics for further study and bibliography of the text all in the form of hypertext. The site had an overload of information that limited my ability to take it all in. I added it to my favorites because it’s definitely a site that I need to look at with more depth. I saw so many benefits for including it into my classes, yet am not sure if I would want my students using it because it could easily enable able them to use the summary on the site over actually reading the text. However, I can see how it might be beneficial for my own research or even for using it after we read the text as a class. My fear is that they would access it for other classes or other literature we read in class, limiting the actual book reading that they do on their own.