Higher Ed Utah

As a student or educator, it’s likely you’re going to spend a lot of time doing Internet research. Whether you’re writing a school paper or compiling background information for a project or syllabus, at some point you’ll need to evaluate and organize the data you discover. The problem is that there is never enough time to do it all. It takes time to find reputable data and make that data look good on paper or in a presentation. Lucky for you, there are plenty of tools out there to help make it easier to conduct and organize your research. Here’s a list of just some of the free tools we’ve discovered to help you:

Bookmarks

Delicious – a social bookmarking service that allows you to: save, organize, and share web pages. You can use Delicious directly from the website or from your web browser with Firefox or Chrome extensions. Your bookmarks will be available to you from any computer with Internet access.

Evernote – with Evernote, you can mark and save web pages and keep them exactly how they looked when you saw them last. You can use this service from the website, from your mobile phone, or from your web browser with Firefox or Chrome extenstions.

Google Bookmarks – bookmarks you can access quickly from your iGoogle home page. Google Bookmarks are stored to your Google Account, so if you don’t have a Google Account you’ll need to sign up for one.

Xmarks – highlights the three top sites in your Google results based on how many people have bookmarked them. Simply move your mouse over the site info icon to learn more about that site and discover sites just like it. Xmarks’ bookmarks will also sync with different web browsers. You can use Xmarks from the website, your mobile phone or from your browser using Firefox or Chrome extensions.

Citations

Zotero – if there is one tool out there that would help you become a power researcher by itself, this is it! Zotero is a Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources and transfer them to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice. You can even use Portable Zotero if you have to do your research at the library on a public computer.

Ottobib - type in a book’s ISBN and select the proper citation style and it will format the citation for your book and make it ready for a bibliography in seconds.

Knightcyte – a little more robust than Ottobib, Knightcite requires you to enter more information than some of the other sites, but has more functionality for sources other than books.

Easybib – another great automatic bibliography and citation maker.

Dictionary

Chrome’s Google Dictionary Extension - double-click any word on a webpage to view the word’s definition in a small pop-up bubble.

Highlighters

iCyte – allows you to save a web page, then highlight and add sticky notes to it. You can share the information and invite others to collaborate with you in your research and brainstorming.

Diigo - another great tool that performs the same functions as iCyte.

News

iGoogle News Gadget – I’m sure that you already have an idea of which websites you prefer to read to get your daily news fix, so the reason I’ve added this is because of the ability to customize this news gadget so that it will look for news according to specific keywords that interest you. Then you won’t have to go out and find as much news on your subject of interest because it will come to you. You can also add local news to this gadget.

Google Alerts – performs the same functions as the iGoogle News Gadget, except Google Alerts sends the customized news feeds to you as an e-mail with links to the original content. It also gives you options to set the frequency of the e-mails.

RSS Owl - a powerful platform independent RSS news feed reader that allows you to read and share information from all of the websites that you visit regularly for the latest news. RSS Owl’s interface is similar to an e-mail client which makes it easy to use.

Google Reader – performs the same functions as RSS Owl except it does it inside a web browser.

Feedly – organizes all of your Google Reader RSS news feeds into a magazine-like format.

Notes

Chromepad- a simple notepad that you can use from your Chrome web browser.

Squareleaf - a virtual whiteboard with sticky notes.

Spaaze – a virtual corkboard to organize your information in a visual way.

Utilities

Deskpins – helps you keep applications on top rather than having an application or web page minimize on you when you use another application. Great for keeping your word processor up on screen while browsing the web.

Fences – a program to help you organize and get the most out of the space on your desktop.

ColorTabs - a Firefox extenstion that makes it easy to distinguish one open tab from another.

TooManyTabs – a Chrome extenstion that helps you stay organized when having multiple tabs open at once. There is also a Firefox extension.

VirtualDimension – a virtual desktop manager to help you multi-task while doing research. Once you’ve opened the link, scroll down to the bottom of the page for a link to download VirtualDimension.