Read and Annotate - Reflect and Connect [July 24, 2012, 2:24 p.m.]

Find, print, read, and annotate a Wikipedia article, a blog post, a poem, or a current news item that is related to your research question. Annotate every paragraph or so with questions, opinions, reactions.

You can do this on paper, or you can copy the article, post, poem or news item into a Google Document, or use Crocodoc. After annotating use one of the Non-Fiction Text Response guides to write a response to your article in a Google Document. Don't post it on Youth Voices yet. You'll want to add quotations and responses from the next two Tasks first.

Choose one of the following for this Task:

Wikipedia: A good starting point For good reasons, a lot of people question the credibility (Can't anybody write something there?) and the reliability (How do we know anything there is true or balanced?) of Wikipedia. Yet it is sometimes a good place to start a research project, to find out what people are saying about a particular topic, and to find other sources. Further, if we support or question any claim from a Wikipedia article with other sources, we are learning good lessons in checking our facts from any one source against other sources.	Search for News on Your Question A good way to start a research project is in the here and now. Find a news article that appeared within the past 30 days. If you use Google News, you'll be looking in about 4,500 news sites. Sure, news comes and goes, but a newspaper is a good place to start your research, to see how your question or topic is showing up in the news these days. You'll also find leads to other more in-depth, well-developed sources that you can use to continue your research.	Search for Blog Posts on Your Question Blogs help you reach beyond the mainstream media to a wider and deeper perspective on a broad range of less common topics. Sure, there are questions about credibility (Anybody can create a blog.) and reliability (How do we know anything is true in a blog?), but blogs can be a great way to start collecting together different perspectives on almost any issue or question that you might want to learn more about. Bloggers often point to other more reliable and credible sources that you can use as you continue your research.

When you have finished your annotations and your response to a text, click the Post Comment button here (on P2PU), and add links to your written response in Google Docs and to your annotatons that you have done on Docs or in Crocodoc. You can find the link to a Google Document under the Share button, and remember to make it Public. Do this before you click Yes, I'm done .

Notice: We encourage students to break out of the overly structured guides that are provided for responding to Non-Fiction Texts. Create your own kinds of response following the more general guidelines that are attached to each of the guides.