App Review: EasyBib Scholar

Site URL: https://www.easybibscholar.com 

Content: Scholar allows teachers to assign, manage, critique, and assist with student research papers. 

Design: The design is clean and user intuitive in both teacher and student accounts. Working within series of interactive menus that allow for file dragging, writing, and organizing on the student end, creating a well-though research paper is efficiently broken down step for step, with plenty of room for teacher input in a variety of forms. Thoughts and resources can be organized quickly within a “Notecard” system that’s both visual pleasing and easy to navigate. This tool makes the process of accurately writing a research paper an easy process. The teacher account allows students to create assignments for classes through assignment codes that are shared with students. After a student has joined an assignment, student analytics and progress can be tracked as they work on their papers. The Google Chrome Annotation Tool is integrated seamlessly, and allows for students to build dialogs around teacher feedback. 

Review: Student accounts definitely help students consolidate research in one accessible, easy-to-manage place, but runs along the slippery slope of becoming an assignment crutch, and possible standard. The “My Notebook” feature allows students to organize quotes, ideas and other research and analysis content in one notecard. Notecards can be grouped and organized even further to establish the draft body of the paper in the “Outline” section. An argument could be made that while this tool can help students write better papers through tracking sources accurately and easily compiling a bibliography, the process of writing the paper becomes less about how to construct an adequate research paper based around a strong thesis, and more about stylizing and formatting. Teachers will need to keep an eye out for students that attempt to template, plug, and play, which is the type of soft plagiarism that Scholar is trying to avoid. That being said, this tool is excellent as an excellent resource for most of the steps involved in the research paper writing process. 

Bottom Line: Teachers can track data sets, including diversity of sources, direct quotes and paraphrases, and attributions to insure that citation is sound within the research, and the annotation tool makes it great for better fleshing out the student writing process under the good guidance. As an addition to middle and high school English or language arts classes, this tool can be a time saver for book reports and term papers for students and teachers alike assignment over assignment. 

Article by Jason Papallo, Education World Social Media Editor

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