What’s just as hard as finding no sources?
Finding all the sources in the world.
Knowing how to find quality research is a vital skill, but the information available online today is so vast that it often overwhelms even those students with the best intentions. Given thousands of available articles and posts, students often turn to Wikipedia for easy and quick information, avoiding the daunting task of weeding through more reliable online sources. Student researchers need tools for navigating the internet’s vast digital library and for finding and curating the most reliable information. The Twitter and Flipboard apps provide students, teachers, and everyone else with easy-to-use tools for discovering and curating online sources.
Using a Twitter List allows users to collect a topic’s leading organizations and experts into a single location. Most of these experts regularly tweet links to recent research about their subject matter. By collecting the experts into a Twitter list, students put these people and organizations to work for them.
Once students have created a Twitter list of experts, they can browse the live Twitter feed, discovering the most relevant links to articles about their topic. Below is a picture from a feed created by a freshman researching mass incarceration.
Next, students gather the best articles from the Twitter feed and put them in one place where they can easily access their work. To do that, students use Flipboard. Flipboard allows users to collect articles in “magazines” created for specific topics.
Using the Flipboard website or app, students can also take notes on their articles, then submit both their articles and notes to a teacher by simply sharing the link to their magazine.
Prospect High School English teacher, Jill Corr, has been using these tools successfully for the past year. Here is a link to her student instructions for using Twitter and Flipboard for research. To use Mrs. Corr’s handout with your students, just make a copy of her document and alter its content to fit your own classroom needs. Teaching research skills has never been more exciting!
