Visual guides and resources are excellent for teaching while citation generator is just flawed enough to force kids to work/think.
Community Review for EasyBib
My Take
Even though my students might be frustrated when Easybib doesn't grab the author name or grabs the wrong words for the author name, I think this is amazing because students need to double-check the work. They need to be able to identify the author and check on the author's credentials. They need to be able to find a publisher so they can determine whether the publisher is a credible one. They need to find the date of publication so they can evaluate the currency of the source. I love how Easybib does the work with the punctuation. I don't want my students to worry about that. I want them to wrestle with issues of credibility and the content in the sources. I love Easybib's visual guides, but I wish they had screencast type videos to help students.
How I Use It
I teach students how to use Easybib after I have taught the concept of the Works Cited page/bibliography. I have found that I have to explicitly teach students the limitations of Easybib so that they can use it correctly. I will search for articles that do not auto-populate the fields correctly for practice with students. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT. This means that I show kids where to look for information on online resources: publisher, date published, etc. I have also used Easybib's resources on how to teach website credibility. I find their guides extremely helpful for students. I particularly like how they use screenshots of webpages and annotated elements that indicate credibility. (In typing this, I realize that I can ask students to use a Chrome extension like Awesome Screenshot to do something similar with webpages that I assign!) I also love how students can log in with their Google accounts to save their entries.