Employers at Microsoft, the FBI and the Smithsonian, are finding that new hires dazzle with techno glitz but “were dismayed to find that most of these college hires were tethered to their computers. They rarely went beyond a Google search and the first page of results looking for “the” answer to a workplace problem.” (Head) They suffer from the delusion that all answers can be found on the World Wide Web.
Salpointe’s students will be expected to navigate the choppy waters of college level research when they graduate. As they progress through higher education they will have to pick out the essential elements of intricate research problems, glean evidence from the mountains of information, explore new ever expanding sources and then repeat the research/writing process several times to experience success. (Reich) They start learning the skills and techniques they need to understand the process in high school. It’s a twenty first century skill set.
To encourage the development of this skill set, we have purchased a Citelighter subscription for the 2014 - 2015 school year. It allows students to capture information from databases and reliable websites, to a dashboard that collects the quote and citation information and provides a comment box to paraphrase the information or make an incisive observation. It scaffolds the organizational process and exports to Microsoft Word or a Google doc. Citations are attached to the concrete details and quotes students are using to support their ideas.
Teachers view “writing instruction [not] as a set of discrete processes, but rather a continuum where teachers must engage with students at the moment they are struggling. The new platform supports teachers and students alike with tools to create, draft, and edit writing tasks, which provides guidance, a sense of transparency, and collaborative opportunities throughout the entire writing process.” (Lepi). Tools provided by Citelighter can help teachers look at the process not just the product. Citelighter’s tools for teachers include cognitive prints of the writing research process, rubrics that can be applied within the application and formative assessment feedback for each group of students. Students can sign up for a Citelighter account at citelighter.com and use "Salpointe" to join and receive their Pro level account.
Citelighter Prezi
Works Cited
Head, Alison. “Old-School Job
Skills You Won’t Find on Google.” The Seattle Times. The Seattle Times,
8 December 2012. Web. 16 May 2014.
<http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2019857185_alisonheadopedxml.html>.
Lepi, Katie. “3 Powerful New Citelighter
Tools.” Edudemic. 22 April 2014. Web. 14 May 2014
<http://www.edudemic.com/citelighter-news-giveaway/>.
Mackey, Kitty. “Research
Process Daisy.” Chart. IRIS. Clark College, 28 Aug. 2009. Web. 16 May
2014. http://www.clark.edu/Library/iris/types/research_process/research_process_p3.shtml.
Reich, Justin. “Are Freshmen
Ready for College Research?” EdTech
Researcher. Education Week. 28 January 2014 Web. 7 May 2014.
<http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2014/01/are_freshman_ready_for_college_research…>.
