Tools for the EPQ

Students in sixth form are working on their EPQs (Extended Project Qualification) and have been gathering research from books and the internet in their relevant areas.  Here are a few tools that they've been finding useful:

Evernote
Evernote is a free subscription service which serves as an online notebook.  Information can be categorised and the format encourages the recording of important bibliographic information. Evernote can be used to store notes, images, articles, anything.  Useful extensions are available for most browsers.

Watch this video for a quick tutorial:

Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that quickly and easily stores all of your online bookmarks.  Specially useful for sharing your sources, keeping track of what you've been reading, and also getting access to collections of sites that others have already collected.

Zotero
Zotero takes these things a step further and formats your references into your choice of system.  We recommend that all students taking the EPQ at advanced level make use of a standard referencing system, in preparation for similar work at University.  The most commonly used is Harvard, but if students are already sure of where they're going to be studying next, they can chose to use the format of that particular institution.  The Firefox add-on is superb and I'd recommend it for anyone who is doing large scale research.  It not only formats website details for you, but can be used to track down the bibliographic information for books, journals and papers too.  Genius tool.