Three Alternatives to Wiki Summarizer

This afternoon I received an email from a reader who wondered what happened to Wiki Summarize. I don't know other than it is no longer online. It was a nice tool that helped students see long Wikipedia entries in chunks. It also included a web of related terms to help students see how topics were connected. While I haven't found anything that is exactly like Wiki Summarizer, I do have a few alternatives to suggest trying.

SummarizeThis is a free tool that summarizes the main point(s) of long articles that you find on the web. To use SummarizeThis you just copy and paste text into the summary box and click "summarize." A summary of the text then appears above the original text that you copied.

instaGrok can be used by students to read summaries of topics that they are researching.  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. instaGrok offers some bookmarking tools and tools for creating journals of notes.

Wolfram Alpha offers a free Google Docs Add-on that students can use to conduct research without leaving the documents they're viewing. Wolfram Alpha can help students quickly locate information about famous people in history, locate socioeconomic data, find science data, and even help students find information about music theory. Unlike on Google or Bing, when students search on Wolfram Alpha they won't be shown a list of links. When students search Wolfram Alpha they will be shown organized collections of information. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to install and use the Wolfram Alpha Google Docs Add-on.

Waiting for InstaGrok

InstaGrok is a promising new academic search engine and bookmarking service that I've written about twice this spring (here and here). Unfortunately, according to their Twitter posts, they have had a server crash. If you're trying to use the service today, bear in mind that it might not be working completely or at all right now. Even though they Tweeted that it's back online, not everything appears to be functioning correctly. I'm sure they are doing their best to get everything restored quickly.

instaGrok is back up from a crash of our server
— instaGrok (@InstaGrok) May 24, 2012

Helping Former Students Through Twitter and instaGrok

Last evening I was Tweeting with a couple of my former students about how their spring semester is going. One of them mentioned that she had to write a paper on the Progressive Era and asked if I had any suggestions to get her started. While I certainly wasn't going to do the research for her, I did get her started and introduced her to instaGrok by sharing this web of search terms and links associated with the term Progressive Era.

Applications for Education
If you haven't tried instaGrok yet, I strongly encourage you to visit it right away. I think instaGrok is going to become a very useful and popular tool amongst educators and students. The basic idea behind instaGrok is to provide students with webs of search terms. Accompanying each web is a set of suggested links, videos, images, and key facts about their original search term. Students can pin their findings to a journal page inside their instaGrok accounts. Class accounts allow teachers to see what their students are searching and pinning.

Learn more about instaGrok in my March 22 post about it.

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.