Weava

Weava is a Chrome extension and iOS app that synthesizes bookmarking, highlighting, annotating, and citation in one tool. It installs in minutes, and then it's as simple as opening a website or an online PDF, highlighting documents, and then organizing and annotating highlights in the Weava dashboard. While it supports websites and online PDFs, users can also upload local copies of PDFs. The highlighter colors can be given names (e.g., "Primary Sources"), and research can be organized into collections as well as subcollections for three layers of organization. Users can also invite collaborators to share research.

The Weava dashboard shows highlighted text snippets on the left panel, along with the names and URLs of the highlights. These highlights can be dragged and dropped into different collections, filtered (e.g., by oldest to newest highlight), and also annotated. Clicking on a text snippet opens up the full document on the right, so users can see how the highlighted section fits in context when sorting through their research. This feature worked most of the time, but for some websites the highlighted section wouldn't be highlighted in the full webpage view. 

Finally, users can drag the desired content right into Weava's word processing tool, generate citations (although these will need to be tweaked), and then export their document to Microsoft Word (the developers claim that more choices are in the works).  

Note that there is a free version or a paid version. The paid version adds more organizational versatility, increased storage, image clipping, and more collaborators.

Weava delivers a simple yet effective way to gather and sort information during the prewriting and planning stages of the writing process (as long as that research is done primarily online or with PDFs that have been scanned). While Weava does not teach students the research or citation process, it supports both by encouraging students to highlight interesting information and then annotate and organize it, and finally to cite it using a feature that automatically generates a citation (which will need to be edited) in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Harvard format. Gone are the days of files piling up on a desktop and then copying and pasting to and from multiple sites and documents into a writing project.

It's possible that some students will go highlight-happy with Weava and get lost in their research, especially since the only onboarding is a text-based document that students will likely skip right over. To mitigate this, teachers will want to run through a demo of Weava as well as help students prep an organizational system for their highlights. Teachers might also require students to annotate each highlight they make. As with any writing program, teachers will have to help students choose credible sources, scan for relevant information, and synthesize research without plagiarizing. While Weava doesn't explicitly help with this learning, it does enable students to focus more on learning by removing a lot of the frustration and tedium of research.