I'm collaborating with 6th grade Social Studies teacher Monica Amaro (@moniamaro59)  on an iMovie project where here students will research topics about the culture, religion, architecture, medicine, food, language, politics, etc. of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. They'll be gathering their research in Google Docs. Monica just showed me something that one of her 6th graders showed her: Google Docs now has a Research Tool that allows embeds a right-side column for you to google websites, images, quotes, and scholarly writings about the topic.

The most satisfying feature for us so far is that when you located images, they are embedded into your Google Doc and their location is cited in a footnote at the bottom of the page. There is no excuse for forgetting to cite your sources anymore!

I found the article below about using the embedded Google Doc's new Research Tool here:

How to use Google Docs' new Research tool: New feature automates research process, making it easier for everyone

By Leslie Meredith

Whether you're a student facing final papers or a parent helping kids with research assignments, Google has just made the process a lot easier with a new tool that automates the research process.

Simply called "Research," the tool lets you conduct searches for terms related to your document or search for just quotes or images from a panel that appears to the right of your document.

Searching for a location automatically brings up a Google map that you can insert as is or edit by zooming in or out. Photos can be filtered to include only those that are licensed for free use — a good idea to avoid copyright problems.

For Web page results, hover over the link to see a preview of the page. Like what you see? Click "insert link" to add it to your text.

Further, the Research tool lets you insert a citation, automatically formatted, into your document.

Here's how it works: After you've inserted a link, click "cite." Google will add a superscript footnote number to the link in your text and generate a properly constructed footnote at the bottom of the page.

There are three ways to activate the research panel. Within an open document, go to the "Tools" menu at the top of the page and select "Research." You can also use a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+R on a PC and Command+Option+R on a Mac. To jumpstart the process, you can right-click on a word or highlight a phrase to launch a search for your term.

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Yoshiko Maruiwa is a member of the 6th grade faculty team here at The School at Columbia University. She teaches Art, and it is a pleasure to collaborate with her on a few different projects each year. After a unit, Yoshiko tries to have the kids take photos of their artwork to load onto shared albums on The Gallery (our in-house photo server powered by Drupal). They then "point" to these images when writing posts on their personal digital portfolio of their work.

Recently, 6th graders completed mosaics - which correlated with their study of Islam and Islamic art. Yoshiko created the following simple slide show for students to use as a guide for taking better photographs of their finished tiles.

Don Buckley (my boss and the Director of Innovation at The School at Columbia University) and I met this morning and created a schedule to formalize our informal in-house professional development sessions. Here's the note that we composed this morning that Don just sent out to faculty:

Based on the success of the iPad App shares and our Tweetup, we’d like to host more meetups about new media literacies. The following dates and times have been set aside for these conversations. Please feel free to suggest other topics too! All meetups will happen in the Library.

Feb 29th (Wed) … Presentations (Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, GooglePres)
March 6th (Tues) ... The Gallery and The Tube
March 28th (Wed) … Twitter/PLN
April 2nd (Mon) … Infographics
April 11th (Wed) … 3D printing (other location needed)
April 26th (Thurs) ... iPad App share
May 7th (Mon) ... Google Forms and more Infographics with data
May 16th (Wed) … TBD
May 24th (Thurs) … TBD

don