For those whose students are ready to learn about proper citation style, and for anyone doing academic research of any kind, this is a really handy utility. It’s called Citation Machine, and if you plug in the appropriate data it will spit out a citation in APA, MLA, Turabian or Chicago reference style.

Here’s an example of what you’ll see.

Suppose Dojogirl were doing a project on Alberta, and she wanted to talk about unusual place names. She might select the following quote from Vivien Bower’s Wow Canada! about Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump:

[A]ctually, the name Buffalo Jump isn’t accurate. The buffalo didn’t jump, they fell. Back when there were lots of buffalo, and before you could buy your meat shrink-wrapped in cellophane at the supermarket, the Blackfoot people used to stampede buffalo over the cliff so they would fall to their deaths. It provided food for the Blackfoot - and a new winter wardrobe too!

Citation Machine can produce a parenthetical in text citation. Just provide the author’s last name and the publication year (for APA format) or the name and page number (for MLA format.) The citation looks like this: (Bowers, 2007) or (Bowers 24).

Dojogirl will also need to add Wow Canada! to her bibliography. She’ll need to provide a little more information for that. Usually, it’s author’s first and last name, date of publication, publishing company and city, and of course the name of the book. Here’s the APA citation:

Bowers, Vivien (2007). Wow Canada! Exploring this Land from Coast to Coast to Coast. Toronto, ON: Maple Tree Press.

And here’s the MLA citation:

Bowers, Vivien. Wow Canada! Exploring this Land from Coast to Coast to Coast. Toronto: Maple Tree Press, 2007.

Citation Machine will give you a line of text to copy and format in your word processor, and will show you a model so you know where to italicize.

Of course, you can cite a whole ton of other sources besides books: periodicals, web sites, interviews, emails, etc. This is where you will find Citation Machine particularly useful. Citing books is fairly simple, and most of us learned to do it when we were in school. It’s all the other myriad sources of information that are not so easy to cite. And for a good many of us, we were out of school before it was common to cite an email - let alone a web page or a podcast….

If you are using the service for a university course you might want to check with your prof, just to be sure the citations are in the format expected. As the web site states, citation is a bit of an art and there are nuances that can’t necessarily be covered by a computer program. When in doubt about how to reference a work, consult your reference librarian or a copy of the appropriate style guide. (Your prof should tell you which one to use, and the guides should be in your library’s reference section.)

Enjoy!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

This resource will be especially useful if you are homeschooling older kids, or if the grown-ups in your household want to inform themselves. FreeDocumentaries.org offers free political documentaries like Super Size Me, The Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, and Why We Fight. You can view trailers for films, or actually watch the full film in streaming video free of charge.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf1CDmn8q0M&rel=1&border=1]

Thanks so much to Heidi, who pointed me towards this entry from Christine. She speaks at more length about how she uses the documentaries in her homeschool. She’s also got a good bit of other good stuff to view & read at her blog, so pop by and take a look around! Christine also recommends viewing the film No End in Sight, which she says presents a very balanced view of the decisions behind the war in Iraq.

Note: These films deal with a variety of subjects, from globalization and war to women’s issues and health. Some of the information is portrayed using strong images and languages. Parents will want to preview the documentaries before showing them to children. This site is best approached with an open mind.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!