During this thing I explored the Michigan eLibrary or MeL for short. This is a great resource for researching different topics. It is more reliable information than what you might get from doing a Google search because it is a part of the library system. I compared some of the databases to see what was available. I compared InfoTrac Junior Edition and InfoTrac Student Edition. I searched some topics that are related to music and found that the Junior Edition did not have very much available. I also looked in the Student Edition and I found that there was more information available, but the level was more for the high school level and not really appropriate for the middle school level. Overall, I am not sure that I would use this resource for my class. I do not really do any research projects in the band classroom. I definitely focus more on learning about how to play an instrument. We do talk about music history, composers and music, but it is just small tidbits of information. I leave the research projects to the core classes. I did however, find some resources that would be useful for me while I was looking through MeL.
During this thing we also looked at citation creation tools. While doing research in MeL you can use their citation creator if you use the information for your research. It was very easy to use. If you open one of the links on the side bar you can click on the citation maker and a box will pop up with a correct citation for the article you are using.
We also looked at other citation tools that can be used. I took a look at BibMe. This was also very easy to use. You pick what type of resource you would like to use and you search for it, click on it and create the citation. Only took a couple of miutes.
Again, I am not sure how often I will use these tools in my classroom because we do not do research projects. However, if that changes I will now know where to go to give my students some easy and great tools to make there projects great!
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