InstaGrok - A New Way to Search and Pin Information

instaGrok is a very promising new search service that I learned about from Joyce Valenza during my time at Discovery's Beyond the Textbook forum. At first glance instaGrok appears to be a new version of Google's old Wonder Wheel service. But after investigation you'll see that instaGrok is more than just web of suggested search terms.

You can use instaGrok to search a topic and quickly get lists of facts on that topic, links to information on that topic, videos, images, and quizzes on the topic. If you want to refine or alter your search, just click on another term in the web of search terms. If the results that you are getting are too difficult to comprehend or are too basic, use the difficulty slider to change the results.

When you find materials that are useful for your research you can pin them or add them to your instaGrok journal. You can add notes to those links in your journal as well.

Applications for Education
instaGrok could be a fantastic tool for students who are struggling to refine a research topic. It also appears to be a great way for students to organize the useful information that they find while conducting their research.

How to Cite a Tweet (MLA Style)

This has been bouncing all over the web for weeks now, but I first saw it Tweeted by Joyce Valenza so I'm going to credit her. If you've ever wondered how to cite a Tweet in your written work, the MLA now has guidelines for how to do it. You can read the guidelines here.

Applications for Education
If you're writing a paper for your own course work and need to include opinions from other educators in that paper, ask on Twitter and you might all of the opinions you need and then some. Now, thanks to the MLA, there is a defined way to cite those Tweets.

Bundlenet - Bundle the Web and Send it to Friends

Bundlenut is a simple service for organizing a set of links and sharing them with others. To use the service just visit Bundlenut and start entering the links that you want to include in your bundle. You can include comments about each of the links. When you have added all of links that you want to include in your bundle, Bundlenut will assign a unique url to your bundle. Anyone with access to that url will be able to see all of your links and comments about those links.

You can use the service with or without registering. The advantage of registration is that you can go back and modify your bundle whenever you would like to.

Applications for Education
Bundlenut could be a useful service to use when you want students to read and evaluate a specific set of online resources like primary source documents. Students could also use the service when they are working on collaborative research assignments to share important and useful links with other group members.

Three Tools Students Can Use To Collaboratively Organize Online Research

One of the challenges that I always give to students when they work on collaborative research projects is to "go deeper than you would if you were working alone." The idea that I try to convey to them that the purpose of working together is not to make the assignment easier it is to make it possible for them to discover more information than they would if they were working alone. If the students are researching a topic online, often a series of emails with links to useful materials gets bounced between them. To alleviate the inbox flood, here are three tools that students can use to collaboratively organize their online research.

Diigo is my number one choice for collaborative bookmarking. Students can create groups or you can create groups for them to which they contribute bookmarks. Bookmarks can be annotated with notes about what makes that bookmark useful for the project that the students are working on. My friend Mary Beth Hertz wrote a nice overview of Diigo a couple of years ago, you can read that post here. The video below provides an overview of Diigo's features. 

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Think Binder is a website that gives students a place to create online study groups. In each group students can share files, share links, chat, and draw on a collaborative whiteboard. Students can create and join multiple groups. As you will see in the video below, getting started with Think Binder takes just a minute.
Embedded below is my brief video overview of Think Binder.


Searcheeze is a relatively new and neat service for curating the web with your friends. Searcheeze is basically a social bookmarking service with an extra publishing feature added to it. Here's how it works. Searcheeze provides a bookmarklet for bookmarking the things you find online. When you click the bookmarklet it opens up a sidebar to which you can drag as much highlighted text as you like from the webpage you're viewing. From that sidebar you can specify which of your collections of bookmarks you want send your highlighted content and bookmarks to. Then back in your Searcheeze account you can arrange your content and publish it for others to see. If you want to curate content with other Searcheeze users you can do so by sharing a collection and working together to add to it.

The video below offers a short overview of Searcheeze.

Searcheeze - Search collaboration made easy! from Searcheeze on Vimeo.