Text-dependent Research - English Language Arts - Capstone

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Research - Reflect and Connect [Sept. 9, 2012, 6:29 p.m.]


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

You can do this on paper, or you can copy the article, news item or blog post into a Google Document, or use Crocodoc. Check for articles in our Youth Voices folder on Cocodoc. Also add articles you find into a folder there as well. 

After annotating use one of the Non-Fiction Text Response guides to write a response to your article in a Google Document. 

Create a first draft in Google Docs. Get a response from a couple of peers and a teacher, then spellcheck and proofread one more time. Finally post your response as a Discussion on Youth Voices.

For this task, choose one of the following places to begin your research:

Image for issue at Youth Voices

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.
Image for issue at Youth Voices

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.
Image for issue at Youth Voices

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 you have written and posted your response as a Discussion on Youth Voices, click the Post Comment button here (on P2PU), and add links to your Youth Voices Discussion Post or Comment and to your annotations 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 .