diablogging: reading tools

This week, tools that enhance classroom reading are on the minds of the bloggers I read. Instructify reviews a very useful bibliography maker called BibMe, and Educamation discusses the social benefits of sites such as Shelfari and Library Thing.

Your students are going to love BibMe for its quick compilation of references in a variety of formats, including the most frequently cited: MLA, APA, and Chicago. You can upload information from almost any source, even film. Here is the MLA citation for the New York Times article I wrote about this week with regard to how online reading affects literacy:

Rich, Motoko. "Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 31 July 2008 .

If you register at the site, BibMe will keep track of your citations, a helpful feature when preparing a long research paper. Of course, we still need to teach students how the citation process works, and BibMe helps us out with a handy Citation Guide.

Do you keep track of the books you read? I have for decades, starting out by recording in notebooks, then discs and CDs, and now Library Thing and Google Books. Edumacation has a well thought out post about the pros and cons of using social media for students to showcase the books they've read.

These tools are useful, fun to use, and cost effective. Best of all, they provide great incentives to read and write.