Watch a two-minute video of the exciting new release coming early this summer:

http://www.noodletools.com/software/demo2012/

This video is also available at YouTube.

Debbie Abilock’s article, “True-or Not?” in ASCD’s Educational Leadership March 2012 issue, is now available online in full-text.

How can students know whether the information they find online is true or not?

We choose everything—from toothpaste to health care, from education research to instructional strategies—by evaluating information. How do I gauge the effectiveness of our one-to-one laptop program? Which presidential candidate will get us out of this economic slide? Is watching SpongeBob SquarePants bad for my child?

We also make daily decisions about whom to trust with our information. Does this company sell my information to third-party advertisers? Should I share my concerns about a colleague with an administrator? When I’m out of town, should I alert the post office to hold my mail or just ask my neighbor to retrieve it from my mailbox?

The staggering volume and speed with which information is presented and the sophisticated ways in which facts and figures are represented make it practically impossible for an average adult to single-handedly judge accuracy and credibility without guidance. Why are we surprised to learn that bogus communications purporting to be from banks or credit card companies dupe smart adults into supplying personal or account information to scammers? Or to find that a high school senior’s essay cites a 5th grader’s slick-looking web page on the Greek gods? Or to learn that teens are making important life decisions on the basis of seemingly reputable health websites that contain inaccurate reproductive health information (Tolani & Yen, 2010)?

In this participatory digital world, we’re all novices at some point when judging whom to trust. Appearance, credentials, and other indicators of quality that used to serve as shorthand tests of credibility don’t readily transfer online. Our students may acknowledge that Wikipedia is unreliable, but they use it anyway—and so do we.

Read more in the Educational Leadership issue.

One of many librarians and teachers who use web technology to support their literacy instruction, Iris Carroll, a reference librarian at Modesto Junior College, in Modesto, California, has created extensive guides about NoodleTools for both students, “NoodleBib Basics for Researchers,” and faculty, ”NoodleBib for Faculty.” We asked her about the development of the guides.

“We started using LibGuides in spring 2009. We needed a way to provide information competency instruction for students on campus and off campus, and using LibGuides provides a flexible, powerful tool for us to do that.

“We’re extremely short staffed here, so we don’t have the luxury of holding formal “training” sessions for ourselves. Therefore, this guide serves as our training manual for staff who have never worked with NoodleBib. Also, when I first started working with NoodleBib in conjunction with a Sociology instructor here, we found the printed help manual very confusing because it intersperses the faculty and student instructions. This guide makes finding instructions pertinent to students very easy. I also made another guide for faculty.

“I thought it was really important to include written directions in addition to the videos. I looked at several good video instructional materials (YouTube videos) but would get lost because they went a bit too fast and had no written instructions. I started using iSpring Pro instead of screen capture software because it allows me to easily enhance a PowerPoint presentation with audio so that students can see screen shots, hear my instruction and follow along reading it themselves. Other than that, just take a deep breath and work through every step along the way. I created student and teacher accounts for myself so that I could play around in either role.”

Check out how Ms. Carroll organizes the basic information her students need to get started with their research projects using NoodleTools. If you have questions for Ms. Carroll, she can be reached at carrolli@mjc.edu .

Our web service provider has informed us that they’ll be making some network upgrades between 6PM (CST) on Friday February 10th and 11:59PM (CST) on Saturday February 11th 2011. There may be some very brief downtime for NoodleTools during that time period as a result.

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!