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.

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!

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. 

We hear from librarians and teachers how they are promoting NoodleTools to their students. Patricia McClune, a library coordinator at the Conestoga Valley School District, tells us about her approach.

Last school year we began using a Web-based product called LibGuides to create online pathfinders for a variety of school assignments. Each LibGuide is a one-stop shop for students. Our library guides are straightforward and nothing fancy. They follow the concept of “less is more” and assemble links to the most appropriate eBooks, databases, Websites and productivity tools for each assignment. Links on the LibGuides provide seamless access to those resources. We promote the use of NoodleTools by including a direct link to our school NoodleTools login page on each of the research assignment LibGuides. It was easy to create a custom widget by hyperlinking the URL for our NoodleTools login page to an image of the NoodleTools logo. Once that “widget” is created it can be reused on other LibGuides. Including a visual NoodleTools reminder encourages students to make use of the citation tool we prefer them to use.

Conestoga Valley High School freshmen. Photo credit: Patricia McClune

University Laboratory High School

“Whodunnit?”

Ever feel booby trapped by a search engine? Imagine using an online catalog to search for a book, only your search sends you smack to page 129 of a book. You can’t see the author’s name, find the table of contents for the book, or even figure out when and where it was published. Web searches do the same thing, often landing you right in the middle of a web site. How do you find the information you need to cite the source?

http://uni.illinois.edu/library/computerlit/sourcing.php
Frances Jacobson Harris
Librarian

A new NoodleBib online tutorial, “Creating an Outline,” is now available in NoodleTools Support Center under Tutorials.

http://www.noodletools.com/noodlebib/tutorials/outline/

This tutorial has captions.