Academic Tech Tips

If you are working on a project or planning a trip, Google’s Bookmark Lists offer an easy way to organize and share the links you find. To use Google Bookmarks, you must have a Google account or create one. Once you log into Google, start searching through Google and click on the star next to any links, maps or videos that you find interesting.

To access your starred links, go to your Google Bookmarks homepage. To organize your bookmarks into a list, just click on the Create New List button.

From here, you can select bookmarks to add to lists and share them with friends. The lists are defaulted to the private setting but if you want to share, here are your options:

Private – Nobody can see it
Public – Anybody can find it and view it
Share with select people – Those people can now add links and comments to your list

When surfing the Web, it’s all too common for us to find useful bits and pieces of information that we want to save and possibly share. We end up bookmarking tons of websites and forget about many of them — even if we have our bookmarks meticulously organized! With Clipboard, you can easily “clip” the key portions of the websites you visit including text, images and even videos. Instead of bookmarking or emailing entire pages, you can clip only the pieces you would like to save, email, or post to your webpage or blog. With a free Clipboard account, you can save clips to your own searchable library as well as create a ClipCast slideshow consisting of the Web clippings you’d like to compile and share.

Getting Started

First you’ll need to install the Clipboard browser extension for Firefox or Chrome: located here. Once you follow the installation instructions, the Clipboard button will show up in your Web browser’s toolbar.

When you click on the Clipboard button you will enter “clip mode” and instructions to clip will appear in your toolbar. You can email and print your clips from your toolbar; however you will need to set up a free Clipboard account in order to save your clips, publish to a blog or webpage, or create a ClipCast. Check out the Clipboard How-to-clip page for further instructions and helpful information.

The concept of Web browsing has been taken to a whole new level with the social website, Stumble Upon.  The most common method of finding new information on the Web is to search for specific items in a search engine such as Google or Ask.com. Stumble Upon enables users to “channel surf” to discover websites, videos, pictures and more based on their interests. By clicking on a button in your browser’s Stumble Upon toolbar, you will be randomly directed to websites that adhere to the interests you specify.  With Stumble Upon, you can tag webpages as well as rate sites the sites you visit with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” which will indicate whether or not you would like to see the site again when you “Stumble.”  You can also store your Favorites online, share sites with friends and meet people with similar interests. 

How to Get Started When you visit the Stumble Upon website you will be prompted to set up an account, which entails providing your email address and selecting a user name.  Once you sign up you will need to select some of your interests then install the Stumble Upon toolbar in Firefox or Internet Explorer.  You can login to Stumble Upon from any computer to access your account.  Keep in mind that you will need to install the toolbar on every computer you use to access all of the features. 

Once you install the toolbar, you can simply click the Stumble button to start channel surfing.  Remember to assign the sites you like with a “thumbs up” to save them to your Favorites.  You may also add sites you like that are not listed yet on Stumble Upon by clicking on the “thumbs up” button when you visit the site.  If you are the discoverer of a website, you will be prompted to tag the site based on a category topic so other users will find the site in a Stumble search. You can also review and recommend the sites you visit. Even if you are not interested in the social networking aspect of Stumble Upon, “stumbling” from site to site is a great way to unearth resources you may have never found otherwise.