Starting my research on educational technology as it’s tied to computational thinking to the elementary school level, I reflected on the methods of gathering information that made me successful in my undergraduate degree. My method was tried, true, and often involved the same 4 steps:

  1. grab as many articles as I can off of ERIC or EBSCO and put them in a folder
  2. start a word document where I can list all of the articles I’ve collected and make some quick notes, extract important quotes, and have the citation in the correct format (whether it be APA or MLA) compiled in a catch-all document
  3. begin creating my final document (i.e. a paper, a project, or a presentation) while referring to the master document I created earlier. Citations would be made and I wouldn’t forget any important information later on
  4. the final bibliography would be cut and pasted at the end in the correct format and the assignment would be done

At the start of my journey in EDCI 570, I was tasked to start using Zotero for research collection. My initial knee-jerk closed-mindset reaction was: “that’s not happening.” My instructor, Michael Paskevicius, suggested that we start small with Zotero and just put all of our readings into it so we had a quick place to keep them, and to check out the UVIC library’s videos on how to use Zotero. It seemed easy enough. I did just that – put the articles into Zotero and watched some videos. The storing and organizing articles side of things was really helpful and easy to use. It made me want to utilize Zotero more. The videos were not as helpful at the beginning of the semester. I had no real applications to use it at the time. Soon, placing class readings into Zotero to glance over and annotate became part of my weekly routine.

Mid-way through the term I began working on my term project and I immediately began to think about how my old undergrad 4 step research style could fit into the confines of Zotero. I still ravenously grabbed all the articles I thought might be useful, but this time, they were made into a new folder in Zotero. I began to annotate and highlight key information in the articles. I soon encountered an obstacle when I realized that my work partner would need to be able to see the articles and my notes on them. Thankfully, my partner and I work for the same school district and are connected via the Microsoft Office Suite, so we decided that file sharing via Microsoft Office would be an easy and user-friendly method. Having a living word document was really helpful for my partner and I where we could read articles together and share our thoughts without having to meet in-person. When it came to whittling down which articles we wanted to focus our project on, we could see at a glance which articles were most important to our research. We didn’t feel like we needed to re-read articles over again when we compiled our project together. At the end of the project, we needed our bibliography and that’s where the Zotero videos really came in handy. I had to re-watch them to get essential information out of them that was pertinent to the task at hand, but I felt like the tutorials were much more valuable to me this time around. I installed the Zotero extension into my Word application and it opened more possibilities for managing my citations.

All in all, I’m really impressed with Zotero and all of the functionality it has. I’m glad that I took the baby steps to start using Zotero, despite my original refusal to do so. Just that little push was all I needed to try something new, see how it best suited my research needs in a collaborative setting, and seek out the different resources to explore what Zotero had to offer. In the beginning, I was really worried that I would have to completely change the ways in which I did my research. I’m pleasantly surprised with how this new way of thinking and organizing my files has complimented my original work habits, yet still stretching my research abilities with added functions. During my end of term meeting, Michael had mentioned that there is a collaborative mode to share Zotero libraries with peers, and I think that is my next venture as I continue to move forward in this program and toward my Masters.