Save Websites to Your OneNote Notebook Quickly

Wouldn’t it be powerful if you, as a teacher or educator, could bookmark content on the web and then have it automatically archived for student viewing in a Microsoft OneNote notebook? When I did that earlier today, the process worked like magic. And all you need is your free Microsoft OneNote account, a free Diigo for Educators account, and a free If This Then That (IFTTT.com) account.

Note: Do you have a OneNote Notebook for students set up? For the purposes of this blog entry, let’s call it “World History – First Period” without quotes. Inside that Notebook, create a Section called “Resources,” which is where your new web page links will be saved when you bookmark them using Diigo.

Step 1 – Create accounts, if you don’t already have them.

1. Create your free Diigo for Education Account.
2. Create your free IFTTT.com account.
3. OneNote, available at no-cost, requires a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one already, you can always set one up for free.

Step 2 – Install the Diigo Bookmark Tool

Depending on what browser you want to use (or all of them), you can install a Diigo add-on tool that will enable you to quickly save bookmarks on your computer. If you are on mobile, then install the Diigo Browser app to facilitate quick browsing and saving.

• Diigo Extension, best for power users, available on Chrome (recommended), IE, Firefox
• Diigo Browser for iOS | Android

Once you have Diigo installed, try bookmarking web pages and adding a one-word descriptor or tag as shown in the image above. Diigo will try to help you by suggesting additional tags that others have used.

Step 3 – Set Up your IFTTT.com Recipe

Creating a recipe is pretty easy in IFTTT, but if you have never done it, you may want to watch this how-to video first or read this MakeUseOf.com tutorial.

Below is the IFTTT recipe I created that places any new public bookmarks tagged “tceamie,” which represents TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE), in Diigo into my OneNote notebook for MIE one-day training participants.

In the boxes above, you would fill in the appropriate information about your OneNote. What’s neat about this is that you don’t have to use Diigo. You can pull content from Twitter, Instagram and a dozen other social media services.

Isn’t that a cool approach? Bookmark your resources with Diigo and auto-save them into OneNote where they can be shared with students and/or teachers. If you get stuck, don’t be afraid to make contact via TCEA.org.