The Web site was unavailable most of the day today. The issue was a corrupted database server. No data was lost, as we replicate your work constantly to secondary servers.

NoodleTools is now running normally, and we have no reason to expect this to happen again. This was the first time in 13 years that we’ve experienced an issue with the database.

Our apologies for the inconvenience this caused you – we know how important the site is to you.  We’ll monitor the site closely on Friday.

Brentwood School, an independent K12 school in California, just released a new LibGuides for NoodleTools. Check out how the librarian, Elisabeth Abarbanel, promotes research basics and NoodleTools to students and teachers. Ms. Abarbanel maintains a blog, InfoEagles, and she is using a RSS feed to display in LibGuides the research tips that are featured in her blog (lower right hand column).

For more great ideas how to use LibGuides to promote NoodleTools, take a look at what others have done at their schools via the LibGuides community.

TIP: To embed our tutorial videos on your web pages, as opposed to linking to them, use the videos at our YouTube NoodleTools Channel where embed code is provided for each video.

1. Click on video you want to use
2. Click the “Share” and then the “Embed” button

Note: these YouTube videos are not closed captioned. We will address this in the future. For now, captioned versions of tutorials are at our Tutorial page on our website.

Amy Rogers is happy to answer questions about using LibGuides for NoodleTools. She can be reached at amy [at] noodletools.com.

A new series of four tutorials for teachers and administrators on how to set up a drop box for students to share their projects, how to view the projects, and leave feedback about their projects. Links will take you directly to the screencasts.

• Sharing (1/4): Creating an Assignment Drop Box   (4:34 minutes)
• Sharing (2/4): Viewing shared projects (2:48 minutes)
• Sharing (3/4): Viewing students’ citations, notecards and outline (1:29 minutes)
• Sharing (4/4): Providing feedback to students (1:28 minutes)

All above tutorials are narrated and close captioned.

See also a tutorial created for students (1:42 minutes) on how to share their projects with their teacher.

Check out other screencasts in the Tutorials area.

UPDATED (Dec 3): The downtime time has been moved to 9PM PST, 11PM CST tonight.

We will be doing another server maintenance duty this Saturday, December 3rd at 8PM PST, 10PM CST. We expect the downtime to last approximately 20 minutes. Please plan accordingly. Thank you!

12/3/11 9:20PM PST Update: Server maintenance is complete!

Join a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar as Tasha Bergson-Michelson brings Debbie Abilock and Jole Seroff, and Steve Hargadon together for a conversation on “search literacy” in education: what sources should students be using, how do we help them evaluate what they find, and what is the school’s role in teaching search literacy and skills? Come with your ideas and questions. Details at http://www.stevehargadon.com/2011/11/live-interview-thursday-panel-on-search.html

New online tutorials are available in our Tutorials area.

• Google Docs integration – For students: How to set up Google Docs for your paper.
• Guide for administrators: Google Apps for Education setup - How to use your school’s Google accounts in NoodleTools.
• Guide for administrators: User authentication – Explains how three different user authentication options work in NoodleTools.
• Sharing projects with your teacher – For students: How to share a project with a teacher.

All above tutorials are narrated and close captioned.

We are working on a new series of online tutorials for teachers on how to create a drop box, view shared projects, viewing students’ citataions, notecards, and outline; and providing feedback on students’ citations and notecards. Stay tuned!

We are doing server maintenance on Saturday, November 5th at 9 pm PST. It will require downtime of 10-15 minutes. If you are logged in at the time, you will be automatically logged out. Please plan accordingly. Thank you!

11/5/11 9:40 PM PST Update: Server maintenance is complete!

Here’s another note from a librarian who is using a web service to promote NoodleTools to K-12 students. Margaret Mary Ryan, a librarian at Saint Ephrem School in Bensalem, PA, wrote: 

I enjoy hearing how other teachers are using Noodle Tools…Over the summer I attended a workshop on Symbaloo and I have “Webmix” or group of web sites that I want the students to use for a particular project. It displays them as a group of tiles, almost like a Scrabble board. One tile provides a link to the google doc where I give them their instructions for the project. This webmix can be accessed from any computer once the student is given a link to it. I always include a NoodleTools tile so that the students have easy access to their accounts. This has proved to be working well for my sixth through eighth grade students. All that they need to complete a project is in one place and they can get to it easily.

Note: Symbaloo has a NoodleTools tile. Use their search function to locate the tile. 

Debbie’s presentation at AASL 2011, “Power Searching: Demystifying Popular Search Engines and Getting Quality Research from Everyday Tools,” was a big hit. Read an overview about the session in School Library Journal:

…librarians packed into the workshop with their laptops in hand to hear Debbie Abilock, co-founder of Palo Alto, CA-based bibliography software company Noodle Tools, Natasha Bergson-Michelson, an instructional librarian at Google, and Jole Seroff, the director of library and information services at the Castilleja School in Palo Alto, give essential tips and answer questions about ways librarians—and their students—can refine their skills to get the most out of online searches.

What are the most popular search engines? Google, Bing, Blekko,DuckDuckGo, and Wolfram Alpha, but many of us—including librarians—lack the savvy to teach and use them to their full potential. But learning about a handful of commands can transform a strong searcher into a masterful one.

“Creative thinking makes good searching,” says Abilock, who told librarians to go back to the basics by thinking about how a successful reference interview is conducted. The fundamental questions that librarians ask patrons to help them define their informational needs also holds true for online searches, whether they’re fact-based ones, such as “What’s the population of Chicago?,” or inquiry-based questions, like “Why did the population there increase between a certain period of time?…”

Read more at…”AASL Conference 2011: Unlocking the Art of Search Engines“

Recordings of our webinar, NoodleTools: Overview for Teachers, Librarians, and Administrators, are now at http://www.noodletools.com/learn/webinars.php