My toolbar

These are my daily tools, and this is how I work. Every single day my iGoogle page acts as my portal for work, play, and socializing. So, let's break it down. (You can click on the image for a clear enlargement.)

The upper toolbar holds the bookmarks I use most often. Google Wave is still in beta, and I play here, seeing what it can do and how it might be used by students and teachers. Once it is opened for general use I can see it as an ideal collaborative space for group project work. My blogging tools are Blog This, Blogger Dashboard, Share on FaceBook and Flickr Creative Commons. I can grab interesting posts from my RSS feed and quickly add them to a post to blog about later, or even just to re-visit and think about and try. Of course, a picture tells a thousand words and Flickr Creative Commons is my one-stop shop for great images I can use with attribution.

The next bar is for Diigo, a FREE social networking site designed for researchers. The Diigo toolbar allows me to grab a website or blog post, annotate it on the live web, attach digital sticky notes, archive it for later use, save it to lists, and if I want I can share it with my Diigo network. Every morning I get an email from my Diigo groups with articles that have been shared by other educators and researchers. The generosity of the Diigo community is a large source of information, most recently from a guy in the U.K. who has been sharing wonderful European primary source sites. I follow lists for school librarians, Web 2.0 Educators, History and English Teachers and a couple of others. Each morning (at the ridiculous hour of 5:30am)  I have my tea, listen to the weather, ignore the dogs, and go through my Diigo updates. Right then I will pull out valuable resources and post them to the library wiki. This allows us to keep enriching our  portal to be a true 24/7 support and resource for students.

After Diigo comes the YoLink toolbar. Another FREE resource, this facilitates deep web searching in a very elegant, easy to use way. As a case study, if you look carefully you can see I accessed Google Scholar (academic sources - terrific resource!) to search "Brecht" and "anti-colonialism", used YoLink to help with the search, and annotated the site using Diigo. YoLink plays beautifully with other applications and also archives searches and sites for notation. If they would partner with NoodleTools life would be perfect in research land. (Why I was searching Brecht and anti-colonialism is another story that involves my college age daughter, a late hour call and a fast approaching deadline.)

Finally you can see the tabs I had open at the time, which are generally always the tabs I have open. Google Docs holds my library documentation, primarily the forms we created to track library data and lesson plans. These forms keep our data organized and churn out beautiful little graphs that I can share on a moment's notice. At this point Google has so much information about me they could create a clone and nobody would ever notice. I got over that reality awhile ago.

And Facebook. I check in quite a bit and use this for professional as as well as personal connections. Awhile ago a library colleague from central Massachusetts recommended a friend. I had never met this person but over Facebook we developed a lively friendship based on similar humor and a mutual (slightly manic) addiction to quizzes. This online friendship resulted in Anita (hi, Anita!) spending professional days observing in the CCHS Library and we will be attending the ALA Mid-Winter conference in Boston together.

There is always something new to try, to play with, to learn. I am connected to smart people who care passionately about learning and generously share this wealth. Our students and staff are the beneficiaries.

Now, about Brecht and anti-colonialism...

Research Tools on Steroids - Wow!

It ain't your parents research project any more. New sources and formats for information call for new ways of searching, organizing and managing the research process. These tools are powerful, and they are (mostly) free. They will also blow your socks off.





This nine minute tutorial on Diigo is well worth the time, because Diigo is simply astounding. It helps manage Web content through web highlighting, sticky notes, tags, and sharing functions. Originally designed for professional researchers, it has found a key spot in education. I am switching over to Diigo for my own use. This is a tool that will help every type of learner.


yolink is an information literacy tool that "with a single click, searches through links and electronic documents for multiple terms and relationships and brings the information to you." What does this mean? This (free) browser add-on helps you do a deep web search, and assists the researcher in drilling deeply into his/her search results. This works with basic websites, e-books, pdf's, any web content. Think about your basic search on, let's say, explorers. A Google search will return millions of hits, so you refine it by adding a few more keywords. Now you narrowed your results to tens of thousands of hits. Instead of having to hit each link and look for your information, yolink finds it for you, splitting your screen, searching each page for your keywords and displaying the paragraphs with text including your keyword on the right screen. A students can quickly dig deeply through multiple webpages at a time and mine the web for information more efficiently. yolink also has bookmarking and notation capabilities, and findings can be exported to a citation tool. Which brings us to...


NoodleTools. yolink is working with NoodleTools on a partnership, and when they pen the agreement I will be singing from the rooftop of CCHS. This is not a free service, but CCHS has an account and every student should be using this for citation and note taking. The student is provided a scaffold for the entire research process, and their new outline feature is fantastic. I use this for my own research projects.

Does everything have to be technology based? Absolutely not. The 5 's of note taking remain the same.

The Cornell Note Taking system is ideal for recording lecture notes, and every student should be adept with this. Kids must be able to take notes by hand, and this is a great way to manage that process

1. Record. During the lecture, as many meaningful facts as possible are recorded.

2. Reduce. As soon after class as possible, ideas and facts are concisely summarized in the Recall Column. Summarizing clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory.

3. Recite. Most of the page is covered and the student tries to recall as much of the lecture as possible, using only what has been written in the Recall Column. This procedure helps to transfer the facts and ideas to the long term memory.

4. Reflect. The student's own opinion is distilled from the notes. This also has the effect of training the mind to find and categorize vital information, leading to more efficient memorization.

5. Review. The student reviews the notes briefly but regularly. Because of the highly condensed nature of the notes, the student remembers a significant amount of material.

So, how does a student know which tool to use, and when? Isn't this all overload? I don't think so. We all have many tools we use in managing our daily lives. In this age of abundant information students will require diverse tools to find, evaluate, and manage their information needs. Tools like Diigo, yolink and NoodleTools give students power and control in their learning, and I can't think of anything more exciting than that.