Top (Free!) Tools to Organize Online Research

I'm starting to think about what tools I'm going to introduce to the IB Extended Essay students to help organize themselves as they do their research. It seemed like a good time to do a re-cap (or a gathering!) of the different online note-taking/bookmarking tools I've mentioned before, and to look for any new ones.  All of these apps work via browser add-ons, and all allow sharing.

I will add that I tested several different tools; I only included a) those that allow you to grab and save content (images, text, etc.) b) the ones that actually worked.  A couple that shall remain nameless repeatedly crashed my browser, wouldn't save content, etc.  They didn't make the list, even in a negative review.  I also didn't include Google Notebook because they've stopped working on it. With that said, here are my top choices:

Diigo: Originally my app of choice, Diigo's biggest flaw is that you can't make folders to organize/categorize your saved information, which means you have to rely heavily on tagging to sift through the items. I'm not sure kids are all that methodical (or consistent) in their tagging, so that's a drawback.  Still, it's a nifty app, and they recently added the ability to capture screenshots and add call-outs to the image. Very cool. Diigo is most famous for the ability to both highlight text on a website, or add public or private sticky notes to the site.  (Kids really love that!)  They offer an education account that makes student sharing and collaboration a breeze. Diigo now has a web highlighter for Safari on the iPad as well as an offline reader for the iPhone.

iCyte:  The best thing about iCyte is it's so incredibly easy to use.  While the features are somewhat limited, it's perfect for upper elementary and middle school students. Clicking on the right side of the iCyte browser button captures a screenshot of the page you're on and brings up a window that allows you to assign the capture to a project, tag the shot and add notes. Clicking on the left side brings up a list of all your captures.   How easy is that?


Evernote:  The granddaddy of them all, of course, and probably the tool I will use with my IB students. Evernote is multi-faceted in that has a Firefox add-on, a desktop application, an iPhone/iPad app  AND an online version.  All of which sync, of course.  You can also add notes from Facebook, Twitter or via email. Evernote also recently added Trunk, a collection of a wide variety of apps and hardware that also work with Evernote. You can add images, text, audio, and video. Evernote saves it all. You can create folders to organize it all. It allows users to create to do lists, which is nice to help students organize their research tasks. Because it does so much, there is something of a learning curve, but it's not huge.  You can find my more detailed review here.

SpringPad:  While not as elegant as Evernote, SpringPad has one feature I really like: it has a notebook app that allows students to add content, and then arrange it onto different tabs. So, as you can see in the image, I created a general notebook for research on St. Francis, with tabs for him, the 5th crusade, and the sultan.  It has an alarm feature that can send either email or SMS reminders (about due dates, for example), as well as a to-do list to help students organize themselves.  Like the others, it can grab text as well as capture a screenshot of your webpage. It also offers apps for the iPhone or Android.

Zotero:  I have a real love/hate thing going on with Zotero.  I love it in theory.  Designed for college and graduate level research, it is phenomenal at capturing bibliographic info from online books, journal articles, websites--even pdf's--with a simple click, and allows users to choose from the major citation styles.  It's a cross between EasyBib and EverNote, in essence.  Sort of a free Noodle Tools.   It will store full files, you can add notes, grab screenshots and all the usual collaborative functions.  You can even use it as a notetaking tool with physical texts (though there's no reason you couldn't do that with Evernote, too.) Students manually add the bibliographic info, then notes are grouped under that entry. But for some reason I just don't like working with it much, and I don't think it would be all that intuitive for high-school students, though I'll admit I've never tried it with them.  If any of you have experience with it, I would be interested to hear what you think.

First Diigo, then iCyte...now, Evernote

Do you ever feel like we're constantly re-inventing the wheel?  Web 2.0 can be something like that,  as we run across  new or, at least new-to-us apps similar to other apps we're already using.

Having jumped on the iCyte wagon, I groaned inwardly on discovering Evernote.  Another web-based notetaking app! But I must say, I like it. It straddles a fine line: more feature-rich than iCyte (and thus a bit less user-friendly) yet not as confusing as Diigo.

Moreover, it doesn't just store your data in the cloud.  You can download a desktop app, a smart phone app, and they all sync with your online data, making your notebooks available wherever you are.

While that's very useful, I think the notebooks make Evernote the go-to app over, say, iCyte and Diigo.  All three allow you to capture websites, make screen grabs, etc.  Only Evernote allows you to sort them into folders or notebooks.  While diehard social taggers consider folders so 20th century, most of us like the extray layer of organizaiton it allows.

Here's a screen-grab of the desktop application.  In the upper right you can see I have three folders created, though currently it's showing all the material in all the folders.  That includes photos taken with iSight, to do lists I created on the iPhone, as well as websites I visited and documented.

In the online version, you can see similar features.  Here, I've selected the "renaissance" folder, and the screen shots of those websites appear.

  If I click on one, it becomes editable, with a nifty feature showing the URL and the date I grabbed the shot (great for citation).

Create a new text note (in rich-text format, I might add), and it can either be straight-forward text, in a clickable to do list format or a table.  Though I must say, that function needs some work.  To make a to do list, you have to go up to the icon and click it for every new line.  VERY annoying and time-consuming.  You ought to be able to click it once, and have the rest of the note in the selected format.

In edit mode, users can also attach files to documents.  For example, if students took a screen shot of a painting, and they downloaded an article about that painting from a database, they could attach the pdf file to the shot of the image.

Like iCyte, Evernote worked with the databases--in fact, it could either just select specific portions, or grab the entire article, which was nice.  If I opted to just grab sections of an article, I could separate them with a line tool, making it easy to distinguish among the sections, instead of having one long block of paragraphs.

Students doing multimedia projects would find this especially useful for keeping their material organized, and I'm thinking of my documentary makers here.   They can collect all of their online research, use their smart phones to add B-roll images of documents or stills, as well as record audio interviews.  Once all of this is synced onto their laptop Evernote app, it's draggable to be used in video editing software.

Of course, this is imminently usable for personal organization as well.  Though I find all of management apps fall apart in one area for me:  they assume I'm organized enough to put all that info in the app in the first place...which I'm usually not.

iCyte: Better than Diigo?

I just discovered iCyte today. Similar to Diigo, iCyte allows users to bookmark sites, highlight useful text, and write comments. I introduced my students to Diigo this year as a way or organizing and keeping track of their online researching.

I must say, iCyte offers a smoother, more intuitive interface. Like Diigo, it's a browser add-on, but instead of a clunky line of tools across the width of your browser, it's a nifty little button next to the URL window. You can either open a side window showing your bookmark history, or click to create a new bookmark.





Creating a new bookmark pops up a window that allows you to tag the site and add a note. You can also highlight sections of the text that will appear when you go directly to the library. Very cool, and much easier than Diigo. Better yet, unlike Diigo the tools worked seamlessly when I tried them with databases. With Diigo, we had to figure out a rather convoluted work-around.



You can create several different projects, and your bookmarks can be either public or private...and shared, of course!

On the website, log in to "My View," choose your project, and you'll see the tags, the highlighted sections and your notes. Like Diigo, you can't organize sites into folders, but this is a great opportunity to teach students the value of tagging frequently and prolifically. If David Weinberger is right, hierarchical folders and files are 20th century thinking, and tagging is where it's at for findability!

Best of all, you don't have to look at all those annoying sticky notes on websites when Diigo is turned on!