Googlepedia presents the most relevant wikipedia article alongside google’s search results for any search term – often just what one’s looking for, and also providing a human counterpart to the ice cold mathematics of PageRank.

Googlepedia: I have classic google as my home page, having tried igoogle and popurls in the past, but finding the overhead just a bit sluggies and, I’ll admit, liking the simplicity of google’s original homepage. I was a bit late coming to the EverNote party, but I’ve become something of a convert, thanks to its ultra smooth integration between iphone and browser – I like using this as a ‘save to read later’ tool it’s also very useful for collecting together websnipets which might not need bookmarking or saving to Zotero’s bibliography database. Delicious has good firefox integration, but Diigo has a better social dimension, and also does nice highlighting and notes for webpages.ĮverNote. With the browser profile in the cloud, the need for another portable bookmarking tool is largely removed, but the web 2.0 aspects of social bookmarking should not be discounted. There are also tools for collaborative bibliographies, but I’ve not got started on those yet!ĭiigo. Zotero’s real strength comes through its use of the cloud to store the database, making it available via any connected computer, and any attached source files such as pdfs, as long as you’ve got access to a bit of connected storage, typically WebDAV, like Apple’s idisk. Zotero 2: I’ve tried many bibliography management tools in my time: I like the open source and Mac only BibDesk, which is a GUI for BibTEX and thus integrates particularly well with LATEX, and nothing comes close to the Mac only Sente for integrating notetaking into bibliography management, but I’ve been won over by the latest (beta) version of Zotero, a Firefox extension that does a great job of keeping track of a bibliographic database, with support for folders, reference scanning, automatic record creation and bibliography export in multiple formats on the fly, all from inside the browser. Below are a few of the extensions I’ve discovered, but I’d be very interested to hear about extensions you use yourself, and any you use with pupils. I also find myself valuing ever more highly Mozilla Firefox’s rich armoury of extensions, which are rapidly transforming the humble web-browser into my portable desktop and, in effect, my personal learning environment. Moving between Windows computers in my new office and teaching rooms, my Ubuntu netbook and my MacBook Pro, I find myself relying more and more on web-based tools, particularly google mail, calendar and docs.

Evernote extension for firefox