PowerNotes

PowerNotes is a Chrome extension that lets users highlight, annotate, organize, and cite most websites and PDFs online. After downloading the extension, students can highlight content and save it to generic or customized topics. Each time you highlight something, you'll be prompted to add it to one of the topics on your list. Students can choose to annotate the text and add a citation, creating "Snippets" of information for ongoing review. On the Project Outline, students can reorder Snippets by dragging and dropping, or filter them by topic, annotation, or citation; this allows students to see at a glance not only how much content they've gathered for each topic, but whether or not they're leaning too heavily on one or more sources. When using the citation feature, students will want to be mindful that they'll likely need to use another tool to ensure proper formatting. 

Students can access useful PowerNotes blog posts to aid their research. These posts offer valuable tips for collecting information, organizing thoughts, paraphrasing, and more. Students will appreciate the added guidance, and teachers will appreciate not having to reinvent the research wheel. The free version allows access to only one project at a time, and there's no option to archive -- only to delete. Be mindful that once you delete a project, there's no way to recover it, perhaps leading to great frustration for both students and teachers.

Managing online research can be overwhelming, especially for novice student researchers, but PowerNotes benefits students by simplifying the process. Aside from improving their writing skills, interaction with high-quality text can help students build essential critical thinking skills, including analysis, interpretation, and determining relevance. There's also an opportunity to introduce students to academic databases, thereby improving the quality of the resources from which students gather ideas. In this case, it's probably a good idea to start with guided annotation practice using paper, pencils, and highlighters so that students become adept at identifying and reacting to important information before digging into online sources. When paired with solid instruction that includes strategies for keyword searches, evaluating sources for credibility, creating in-text citations, elaborating on ideas, organization, and writing with clarity for different audiences and purposes, PowerNotes is a great fit -- the intuitive design naturally leads students to annotate, cite quoted text, and organize content as they gather it. 

Since there's no way to share projects or export notes to a document, teachers may want to encourage students to use PowerNotes as a starting place for organizing research but choose a more robust tool to finish the job, especially since PowerNotes lacks the collaborative and digital feedback capabilities that similar applications provide.