English IV Regular Research Paper

I wanted to record a few of my thoughts about the latest version of the research paper process that I am undertaking with my regular Englilsh IV students.  We are currently at the point where students are just beginning to write, and I feel better about the way students have been prepared this time than I ever have before.  I want to make note of new ways that I have prepared them this year:
We started choosing topics and finding articles really early in the semester.  Of course, I have done this before.  Honestly, I have just had to forgo teaching literature almost completely in order to spend more time choosing topics and collecting information.

• This semester I required students to annotate their articles directly onto the copy of the article itself.  I used Chris Tovani's method of annotation.  In the past, I have had students write summaries of articles, but honestly it was usually pretty painful for all involved.
• Now, one thing that I did do was to require students to create an annotated bibliography.  Annotated bibliographies have been a great way to make students learn and demonstrate MLA works cited pages.  After each citation, I had students write a paragraph summarizing the article and explaining whether the article would be useful in their paper or not.  This exercise is much more effective than the preliminary works cited that I used to require.  Students are more willing to summarize when they see a summary as just part of a paragraph in their annotated bibliography.
• I did use the tried and true exercises that I have on plagiarism, works cited and parenthetical citations.  What was really effective was that after we worked on parenthetical citations, I had students create parenthetical for the articles they had found so far.
• Another just by chance effective practice was that we started with the plagiarism handout pretty early; then I returned it to students just as we were starting to write.  It was a nice reminder at an appropriate time.
• This year as we were working on thesis statements, I had students take a piece of notebook paper, turn it sideways, write the beginning of the thesis at the top (what should be done).  Students then split the paper into three columns and wrote one point of their thesis across the top of each column.  Then, I had them find (first) a direct quote to go into each of the column. Then we started finding supporting points to go into each one of the columns.  I required students to have a parenthetical citation for each point.
• Of course, the piece of notebook paper was not big enough to hold all of their information, so we then moved to three pieces of colored copy paper (one color for each point of the thesis; remember: color is motivating!).  I required each student to have 6-8 phrases or sentences in support of each point before they could move on to the next point.  My question to them when they felt like they were done was "Do you think that you can write two to three paragraphs about this point based on the information that you have?"  The pieces of colored paper were really effective in that I could look at a student's piece of paper and ask them questions like, "Does this information really support the point of your thesis that you are trying to prove?  Maybe it really supports another point you are trying to make..."

So, anyway, so far, so good.  I hope that the papers come out as well as I feel they will, and I hope that students have really learned important lessons about plagiarism, quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, supporting the points that they make, and formatting and writing research papers.