More and more, online research tools are making it easier to help students learn to do research, keep notes on their research, annotate their online readings, and share the results of their research. Here are some useful (and free) tools to aid in this direction.
Annotation Tools allow you to annotate webpages.
- Diigo lets you keep an annotation private or share it. Plus you can search through your annotations and use them to post to post your bookmarks to other services like del.icio.us and magnolia. (See Bookmarks and Digital Ethnography for more information.)
- Cogitum Fototagger is an IE extension that tags and annotates images
Bibliographic managers help you manage and cite sources
- Zotero is a Firefox extension that works somewhat like the desktop applications Endnote, Sente, or Bookends. Only it's free.
- citeulike
- Cogitum Co-citer is an IE extension that keeps text citation information
- Cogitum Image Co-tracker is an IE extension that keeps image citation information
Ryan Dube gives a good review of how to use the Cogitum research tools
Personalized portals of news, photos, and videos can be used to keep a constantly updated stream of research on any topic. For an example, see Will Richardson's Pageflakes portal on Darfur. Four popular portals are
For a comparison of those four portals, see CNET.
Tutorials exist, too:
- For Netvibes, see Masey's tutorial.
- For iGoogle, see this video.