It's a Cinch to Cite

As we get geared up to start fun research projects again here at Caleb's Creek, I thought it would be helpful to give some reminders about copyright and citing your sources. As part of any research, you should always give credit where credit is due and you should cite your sources of both information and images.

Your best bet is to use images that grant you permission to use them from sites such as Creative Commons or Pics 4 Learning, or use clip art that is part of the program you are using such as Word. While these grant permission to use, you should still cite the source. For example, if you want a picture of a crocodile, go to Pics 4 Learning, search for crocodile, and this is one of the results you get. You should then copy and paste the url under the picture as I did here:

http://www.pics4learning.com/details.php?img=crocodiles16.jpg

For images, the url is usually enough to give credit, but it still must be for educational use and should not be a copyrighted image if at all possible. For research, you need to cite more information than just the website or title of the book. This citation maker site helps you fill in the information you need to create your bibliography. A bibliography is a list of the sources you used to gather your information and includes both print and non-print sources. Remember that information should be gathered in short phrases and put into your own words, not copied from your source.

We will use all of this a lot this year in the media center so be sure to remember to keep track of sources you use on your projects!