Published November 28, 2006

SourceAid has donated subscriptions for its Citation Builder tool to all MLTI teachers and students.

Getting students to cite sources properly has always been a challenge. Now, with the availability of many different kinds of print and digital resources, giving credit where credit is due has become even more confusing. Very few people can remember the exact format for a citation for a book, let alone how to cite an email message or an internet database. Giving students a tool to use to make MLA or APA style citations removes some of that confusion, encouraging them to cite their sources and to do it correctly.

SouceAid a web-based citation creation service has donated subscriptions to its Citation Builder to all MLTI 7th and 8th grade teachers and students. To access this tool, visit the special MLTI SourceAid site and create an account. To register, students must have an active email account and must know their school's MEDMS identification number.

Once they have registered, student can log on to Citation Builder and begin to create a bibliograpy page. The first step is to choose a citation style from the pull down menu. Most middle schools in Maine use the MLA format for citations. The second step is to choose the type of source to be cited. The list of possibilities includes a wide variety, which is necessary even at the middle school level as students begin to use more multimedia and digital resources.

The next step is for students to fill in the form with the relevent information about their source. When they click Next they'll be taken to a new page that gives them a correctly formatted citation. As more citations are added, they form an alphabetized Works Cited page. The student has the option of downloading the Works Cited page as an rtf file, saving it online for future work, or emailing it. Students can also make a correctly formatted footnote or endnote for each source. The Help pages for Citation Builder are clearly written and easy to use. Please take the time to check out and introduce your students to SourceAid's Citation Builder. Learning good citation habits now will serve them well through high school and college.