Ed tech to help writers and readers: PowerNotes

I've always been interested in how teachers can use the many available apps and digital tools to help teach writing more effectively, and in my roles both as the Director of Drexel's University Writing Program as well as President of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators, I've been exploring several particular tools in depth lately.

This time, I'll talk about PowerNotes. I've had multiple conversations with PowerNotes representatives, and through those conversations and my explorations, I have seen how this platform can help writers, as PowerNotes says in a YouTube video, "gather, track, and organize your research."

Like many apps, PowerNotes operates from inside a browser, in this case specifically via a Chrome Extension. Once installed, PowerNotes helps writers organize notes and develop annotations from digital sources. Working directly within Chrome, the writer

• Opens up a webpage or article (PowerNotes works on html text and PDFs, as long as the PDFs are opened in Chrome)
• Highlights text as they read
• Creates "topics"--a process built into PowerNotes--through which to organize those highlights
• Writes annotations (of any length)
• Edits and organizes these topics and highlights
• Develops an outline through a fjunction somewhat like "digital notecards"
• Creates citations based on these texts

The writer can also track their progress and download the material they've saved.

You can see graphics and screencaptures on the PowerNotes pages linked above, but I'll say here that the functionality is pretty slick, with shortcut features to allow writers to streamline their annotating and note-taking--all the while possibly changing the way writers go about such activities.

As you work, you end up building a kind of outline. Even for those who aren't outliners, as I'm not, I could immediately see how the organizational structure enabled by the app could help with writing structure. For instance, I'm working on a big project right now: A book. I'm reading a series of different articles about mobile technologies, and instead of creating clunky headings and entries in a Word or Google doc--a long-standing approach that I've used--I have the organization created basically as I clip quotes and annotate.

Aside from the specific advantages of this platform, I want to say that generally I believe those of us not just in OWI but comp/rhet should cultivate our relationships with technology innovators more fully. Smart people are developing tools that can help our students read and write as well as assist our many colleagues who teach writing in WID and WAC environments. We have things to learn from these tools, and technological determinism aside, these students and colleagues could be big beneficiaries from our informed explorations.