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Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
If you’re anything like me, one of the reasons you might enjoy reading on paper, rather than on a screen, is the ability to easily highlight or annotate a text. Some platforms do allow users to make notes on the computer, such as documents that can be opened in Microsoft Word and some PDFs using Preview – both Word and Preview have built-in highlighters, even if their functions are minimal. And yet, what if I wanted to interact with other digital content, like information found on a website? Before I discovered scrible Toolbar, I was out of luck. I would find myself copy/pasting text into Word and losing formatting, context clues, design, and other embedded materials in the transfer. Worse was finding a site I wanted to annotate, and feeling the need to waste 20 or 30 pages of paper just to print it out, read it over, and recycle it shortly after.
All of that being said, scrible Toolbar has completely changed the way I am able to do research online. It’s a bookmarklet, which means it lives in the bookmarks section of your browser, and can be easily accessed after installation with a single click. This tool is completely free, and allows users to highlight, leave “post-it” notes on specific sections, change the color of text within a page, underline text, make an annotation legend, etc. It is also possible to save annotations for later by adding them to a user’s library, which gives the option of labeling, describing, and tagging entries for easy future retrieval. Additionally, it’s possible to easily share one’s annotations via Twitter, Facebook, or email, or, one can download the page directly to her hard drive. This also makes it possible to access webpages whether or not a user is connected to the Internet. The basic plan is free and allows users 125 MB of space; the student edition, which is also free, upgrades users to 250 MB; then of course there are paid plans for users who wish to scribble more excessively.
I highly recommend scribble Toolbar, especially for students who are sifting through large amounts of web-based data. Your transferring/copy-and-pasting/killing-many-trees days have quite possibly come to an end!
Reply to Lyndsay