Students LOVE highlighters! Of course highlighters are only as good as the ability our students have to only highlight the key, or important ideas in the text they are reading. Through modeling and practice this skill will help them in many aspects of their learning.
When we are teaching students how to pull important details out of a website, we can do that easily WITHOUT having them print out the website. Printing websites and highlighting is the old way…
The new way is to use a digital highlighting tool, these are sites that allow you to save websites, and the highlighted material that students need to refer to later. Some of these tools also allow our students, and us, to share notes that we attach to the website.
Highlighting tools:
diigo allows highlighting of websites, tagging, posting to a group, and writing notes on your websites. They also allow you to take a ‘snapshot’ of a website so that you can always see that snapshot in time. Read more about ways to use diigo for collaboration on my post ‘Collaboration using diigo‘. I love this tool, mostly for the reason that it has many features, all in one place, and a educator’s upgrade that allows us to create a secure environment for our students to collaborate, share and assist them with research.
Awesome Highlighter This is probably the easiest to use, simply paste your url, highlight website and send link to share site with highlights. You can also share your highlights via twitter, delicious, wordpress or facebook. If you use this feature often you can also download FireFox add-on so you can easily paste urls and start highlighting. This can be done without registering, but if you want your pages saved you will need to sign up for a free account. I could see this easily being used to share websites with students or colleagues. If you want a ‘down and dirty’ digital highlighting tool, this is is.
Check out more information about The Awesome Highlighter at Free Technology for Teachers: ‘The Awesome Highlighter is Awesome’
A.nnotate is another option for highlighting, sharing, and putting notes on websites, as well as other documents you upload. There is a free version (allows 30 uploads a month) and a paid upgrade as well. For a detailed description of possibilities go to ‘Mark Up Your Documents with A.Annotate’ from Makeuseof.com
More highlighting and annotating resources, check out:
Larry Ferlazzo’s ‘Best Applications for Annotating Websites’