EasyBib’s Library Corner: Mobile Technology in the Classroom

Posted by Emily G. on May 31, 2012 in Library Corner | 0 comments

Emily Gover is an information literacy specialist and in-house librarian for EasyBib. Her professional interests lie in web services and design, usability, information literacy, instructional services and reference work. She continues to work part-time at the Hendrick Hudson Free Library, and has previous work experience at Berry College, Reader’s Digest and the University at Albany.

Project Tomorrow came out with a new study this week about how educators and administrators use technology in their personal and professional lives. Turns out, technology use is on the up and up! Check it out: more than half of educators polled own a smartphone, close to half of principals and administrators have tablet computers–and, surprise!–librarians are most likely to own a digital reader.

When asked, educators and administrators who are more likely to use mobile technology agree that some of the best outcomes of using mobile technology in the classroom are:

1. Increasing student engagement
2. Providing access to online textbooks
3. Providing personalized instruction to students
4. Extending learning beyond the school day

Finally, take a look at this chart, it shows important factors to consider when consuming online content compared between librarians who do and do not use digital content. Librarians who do use digital content (such as podcasts, videos, animations and electronic databases) are more likely to recommend consideration of these factors over librarians who do not.

What are some other benefits students can gain from having mobile technology in the classroom?

Sources:
Project Tomorrow report
Personalizing the Classroom Experience summary

Why Take Virtual Notes? 5 Reasons

Posted by Caitlyn Selleck on Oct 17, 2011 in Blog Posts | Comments Off

We’re all familiar with the tried and true method of jotting down notes with good old pen and paper. But we live in the 21st century now and there are a myriad of great tech tools that can help you be more organized and efficient. Reasons like:

5. Easily keep track of the sources you’re using. Taking notes with pen and paper? Ugh. Good luck formatting your citations too. Using online tools, however, you can effortlessly keep track of bibliographic data and links. You will know where your data comes from, and will avoid plagiarism. And if you use EasyBib, it will automatically format your citations and associate them with your notes

4. Easily transfer information from notes, to outline, to paper. If you’re taking hand-written notes you have a lot of copying to do. From the outline to the paper, you often re-write much of the information from your notes. With virtual note-taking you type from the get-go, ensuring that you can copy and paste your ideas at every step – meaning you’ll save time and be better able to coherently keep track of ideas. Moreover, with EasyBib, you can associate notes with your outline, and link your notes and outline to a paper in Google docs.

3. Easy editing, formatting, and linking. With hand-written notes you’re always making a mess on your page: scratching things out, squeezing words to fit the margins, and forgetting to make lists or indent. With virtual note-taking there’s no need to sweat that, especially if you’re a perfectionist. You can always go back and easily delete or add things, insert formatting, and even stylize your text. Let’s see your ballpoint do that.

2. Traditional note taking requires paper. By taking notes online, you not only save costs on paper and pens, but by lowering the demand for such resources, you help improve our environment. Taking virtual notes means being green!

1. Access your notes from anywhere. With most online note-taking services all of your data is stored in the so-called “cloud.” This means that you can start taking your notes at home on your PC, then transition to school (or anywhere else) and pick right where you left off on a different computer. Moreover, it’s safe, you can’t lose them, and they can’t be destroyed.

Luckily for you, your pals over at EasyBib have their very own Notebook tool. Check it out, because it can do some pretty cool stuff. Associate your notes with sources you cited, quote, paraphrase, tag, group, color code, create outlines… Woah. That’s some powerful stuff.

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