APA Formatting Tips and Tricks

APA Format Tips and Tricks

What is it?

  American Psychological Association Format

Why Do you need it?

  This will help you cite works used within a research paper and on a reference page at the end.  This way you can give proper credit to the original sources of your research.

Reference Page Helpful Hints:

      Cite your references in your paper to help readers easily locate them on your reference page.

      Title your page “References” and center it on the top of the page.

      Arrange your citations in alphabetical order.

      Double space your reference list.

      Use Italics for titles of books, journals or videos.

      Keep article titles and chapter titles in plain text.  DO NOT format them.

      Use page numbers only if you have pages from a specific chapter or article.

Hints for handling citation of Online resources:

      Follow the basic format as you would for print materials – author, date, title and publication info.

      The author of your document may be an organization rather than one person.  This is OK.

      Two dates needed – First the date the information was published.  Then you will also add a date of retrieval for when you found the information cited.

      Include the URL of the source.

      Include the specific parts of the web document if appropriate.

Example of APA cited reference:

Altrichter, H., Posch, P., & Somekh, B. (2003) The Written Survey. In Teachers investigate their work: An introduction of the methods of action research, (p. 110-114). London: Routledge.

High School students Learn Virtually on a Snow Day

I read about an event this week that I think is fantastic!  This winter has brought much winter weather to the east coast, and in some cases, many snow days.  Sometimes the unexpected number of snow days leads to having to make up the instructional time later during the spring.

Pascack Hills High School in Northern NJ today is having their first “virtual school day” today.  Students will use laptops issued to them by the district (already part of their program, which would be a necessity for making a program like this one work) to log into their classes and complete assignments posted on the class web page by their teachers.  In some cases, they will be using Google Docs to collaborate on assignments with other students or do peer editing, in others they will complete an assignment and email a digital picture of their notebook to their teacher.  Students also get to continue their learning on a a day they otherwise would not have gone to school.

Hopefully, this virtual learning day is successful for them, and hopefully as the access to learning devices increases, can be something that will spread to other districts and states.

Articles read include:

Bergen Record Online article (http://www.northjersey.com/news/bergen/Virtual_school_looms_today_for_Pascack_Valley_High_School.html?c=y&page=1)

News 12 New Jersey article:  http://newjersey.news12.com/news/pascack-valley-regional-high-school-district-to-hold-virtual-class-on-snow-day-officials-hoping-to-avoid-a-make-up-day-1.7051404

The Tech Integrator

 

Use Animoto to Promote Internet Safety

Third grade students have been reviewing the importance of internet safety and giving proper credit for utilizing another’s work.  This past week, they combined these tools and created public service announcement videos to educate others about being safe online.  We used Animoto (www.animoto.com) , a web based tool that incorporates pictures, text and music to create short videos.  The students did an outstanding job and had a lot of fun with this project.  In addition to embedding the produced videos on the teacher web pages for students to view each other’s and share with their parents, we will be sharing them to educate other students in our school via our morning news program over the next several weeks. This was a great experience, and based on conversations with teachers since the project, it was a success I look forward to my teachers coming up with other uses for this tool in the near future.

Here are some samples of the completed videos below.  Enjoy!  Feel free to share comments below and any other ideas for incorporating Animoto into the classroom.

The Tech Integrator