Cool New Tool

I-Lighter is a shareware program that allows you to annotate Web pages and save your annotated version to the Web for others to see. I can imagine students using this for Internet research projects. If four students are researching The Supreme Court. They create a public folder and divide up the resources their teacher has identified for their research. They read relevant Internet documents, highlight them and make notes using i-Notes. One of their research documents like look like this.

The highlighted text was created with I-Lighter. When they begin creating their report each student can access all the research. None of it is saved in an individual student's folder or hand written on pieces of paper stuck in one student's desk. Better yet reams of copy paper and barrels of ink were not wasted printing out interesting Web pages.

When you open your saved Web documents, you will find the full text of anything you highlighted and any notes you typed. You will also have a link to the original Web document. From here you can paste your notes directly into Word if you like. Students using this tool will need a stern reminder about plagiarism and proper citation of sources.