The Awesome Highlighter is Awesome

The Awesome Highlighter is an easy-to-use tool for highlighting, clipping, saving, and sharing interesting things you find on the web. Using The Awesome Highlighter you can highlight chunks of text from a website and save just that text, along with the url, to your Awesome Highlighter account. If you want to add some notes of your own to the text you can do that as well. Should you decide to share your findings with others, The Awesome Highlighter provides a shortened url that you can email, Tweet, or post on the web. The shortened url provided by The Awesome Highlighter will lead others to what you highlighted and the notes you wrote.

Back in your Awesome Highlighter account you can sort your clippings into groups for text, images, or videos. You can also sort your clippings by date or domain. If you've added tags to your clippings you can use those tags to sort your collection of clippings.

The easiest way to use The Awesome Highlighter is to install a bookmarklet which you can click while viewing any page. Installing the bookmarklet is a simple drag and drop process in Firefox. If you don't want to install the bookmarklet you can simply enter a url on The Awesome Highlighter homepage to take advantage of all of the highlighting and sharing options. The screen capture below shows the basic functions of The Awesome Highlighter bookmarklet. (click to view full size)









Applications for Education
The Awesome Highlighter could be a useful tool for students to use as they conduct online research. By highlighting and adding notes to the resources they find, students will be able to quickly remember what it was about a website that they thought would be helpful.

You could also try using The Awesome Highlighter to pose questions to your students about something you found on the Internet. In the screen capture above I created the example of highlighting a part of Wikipedia and posting about the paragraph in the sticky note. I can then post the shortened url provided by The Awesome Highlighter on my course blog.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Seven Tools for Organizing Web Research
Diigo Teacher Accounts
A Quick Guide to Annotating Using Diigo