Annotate+Websites

[|www.blerp.com] Lets you annotate webpages and, I think, might be the best tool of its kind out there. Once you register (which is extraordinarily easy and doesn’t require activation by email), you type in a webpage address, click on “post” and you can type on a virtual post-it note and place it anywhere on the text of the page and you are then given the page’s url with the notes. It’s extremely user-friendly. But that’s not all. It also allows you to see what other readers of the same page have written. All those virtual post-it notes are listed on the side of the page. All you have to do is click on a note and it magically appears at the location on the page where it was placed. A lot of the things many web tools allow you to do are neat, but don’t necessarily provide much “value-added” benefit to doing the same task using non-tech tools, only let you do the exact same thing you can do with hard copy. With Blerp, however, after students have completed demonstrating their reading strategies, they can then see what everybody else has written, too. Now, that’s a way technology can enhance learning. The ability to annotate webpages — the equivalent of making notes on a written text — is absolutely critical for students to develop their reading skills. Using “post-it” notes on text to demonstrate the use of reading strategies is a key teaching and learning approach that should be use in the classroom.

[|roohit.com] Is a tool to annotate webpages. A couple of great features, though. One, you don’t have to register for it. And, two, all you have to do is put “roohit.com/” before any web URL address and you can start highlighting and leaving notes about it. A negative is that it looks a little busy.