ECOMP 5004: Website Evaluation

The Awesome Highlighter

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Site Description: 

The Awesome Highlighter, referred to sometimes as AH, was started by three guys from Florida. According to their Facebook page, the company was founded in February on 2008. There are no names provided for the founders or who maintains the site, only an online form to request support.

Classroom Use:

This web tool gives students the ability to use a digital highlighter on any webpage of the Internet. Students can highlight text as well as pictures. AH provides a toolbar at the top of the page for students to add a virtual sticky note to the page, access their “Help” menu, and best of all: change their highlight color. 

Once a webpage has been highlighted, students then click the “Done” button on the toolbar. They are taken back to AH and are shown an overview of the information they have highlighted. Students may then choose to email the notes, copy them to the clipboard, or share their notes via variety of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Students may also copy the unique URL provided at the top of the page for later access. There is also an option beneath the summary for the student to return to the page to add additional notes and/or edit the notes they have already highlighted.

AH can also be used by teachers who would like to point students to important and/or specific information on a webpage. Teachers could use the sticky notes tool to instruct students on what they need to do with the information on the webpage. Here is an example of AH in action: http://awurl.com/3zTmJLYRh

State Standards Connections:

Maine Leaning Results (MLR)

English Language Arts

A. PROCESS OF READING
MIDDLE GRADES 5-8

7. Summarize whole texts by selecting and summarizing important and representative passages.

H. RESEARCH-RELATED WRITING AND SPEAKING

MIDDLE GRADES 5-8

7. Use search engines and other Internet resources to collect information for research topics.

Recommendation:

With the presence of technology in schools and the classroom today, using the Internet as a research resource has become a common occurrence. In fact, when given the choice many students will turn to the Internet before accessing more traditional resources. In my school, the current standard operating procedure is for students to print out the Internet resources they find. This translates into a lot of printing and a lot of wasted printing supplies, since webpages often do not print neatly onto an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper. Awesome Highlighter gives students the ability to pick out the important pieces of information on a webpage and refer to those notes for use later when they write their reports. If students are working collaboratively on a research project, AH allows team members to easily share their web notes with one another.

I think this is a great tool for teachers who want to move closer to working completely within the digital environment. Awesome Highlighter makes it easy for both student and teacher to takes notes on webpages and then save those notes for later reference or for sharing with others. The add/edit tool, in tandem with the different highlighter color tool, could also be a vehicle for collaborative activities. While the site does have a login so that you can save your highlights on their system, use of AH is free and does not require registration to use. 

However, as with any web-based tool there are a few glitches in AH that users should be aware of. For example, the “+ add a note” tool often takes several seconds to respond (I was having to wait upward of 5-8 seconds for the note to actually appear). In addition, when using the add/edit tool to return to the webpage your previous highlights are not displayed on the page save only the last item you had highlighted. This could create confusion for students and discourage them from using this service. There is an available AH add-on for the Firefox browser they may improve the performance of this web tool. The service also offers a feedback section to leave comments on their service, so I forwarded this concern to them in the hopes they will make this tool more robust and reliable.