ERIC gets social (5 new ways to do ed research)

While many of us weren’t watching, ERIC, the granddaddy of education research, has grown a lot more social.  As we prepare for a fall filled with professional development, it might be a good idea to share some of ERIC’s new coolness with the faculty.

In case you never had the pleasure . . .

Sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education, ERIC, or the Education Resources Information Center:

is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

The ERIC mission is to provide a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information that also meets the requirements of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 .

So what’s new with ERIC?

1. MyERIC A new free tool allows you to personalize your ERIC experience, by managing your searches, sources, and citations.

Each My ERIC user can create and use up to 10 custom folders to store as many as 50 citations each from ERIC search results. Saved citations can be printed, emailed to yourself or a fellow researcher, or formatted for import into many popular citation management tools.

Participants may opt to share their saved searches with communities of interest.  Users may also sign up to receive email alerts.

2. The ability to submit your own work for inclusion: In an open and particularly democratic move, participants may now submit their own non-journal writing, relevant to education– conference papers, dissertations, research reports, etc.–for consideration for the ERIC Collection through an Online Submission system.

3. ERIC now does RSS

It is easy to automatically push current material on your personal educational specialty or interest to your reader, browser, or mailbox. Build a customized RSS feed or select from among 20 pre-established feeds from the list of currently available topical RSS Feeds, on the ERIC site.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Autism
Bullying

• Cyberbullying
• Prevention/Intervention
• Relational Aggression (female bullying)

Community Colleges
Classroom Management
Financial Aid for College
High School Student Motivation
Instructional Leadership
Parent Involvement and Elementary/Secondary Education
Rural Special Education
School-Based Budgeting
Student Health Issues (Obesity)
Teacher Effectiveness

Using RSS Feeds in ERIC (1 min. 56 secs.) is a 2-minute tutorial, explains how to set up and use RSS feeds to track material on specific education issues in the ERIC Digital Library. This tutorial, and many others, are available from the ERIC Web site (see Help > Tutorials).

And speaking of video help,

4. ERIC has a YouTube Channel offering a similar group of brief screen-shot based tutorials.

5. ERIC has a Facebook page where you get updates like those I am sharing here. Recent wall posts announced summer updates for the Thesaurus, the addition of 6,400 fulltext documents, and the suggestion: Thinking ahead to the new school year? Try an ERIC search using the Thesaurus terms “Parent Participation” or “Parent Associations.”

Now, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but how about a Twitter update?  I can’t seem to find the feed.  Did I miss it, dear ERIC?

Filed under: databases, research, search tools, teachers