We’ve had incredibly positive feedback about the first round of summer updates last week. In a few weeks, the next round of updates will be released. The most significant change will be something that you’ve all been requesting — multi-student project collaboration.

As we designed NoodleBib’s collaboration features, we reviewed the wonderful ideas and insights you’ve sent our way — what features groups could use and how students work together. We’ve also investigated the research on effective collaboration, so that the software we build supports good instruction and effective practices. It’s probably no surprise to you that successful teams set well-defined goals and create a clearly-defined structure for their work.

While participating in a team is inherently more complex than working alone, the benefits of socially-constructed knowledge are well-documented:

• well-executed collaborative learning improves individual academic achievement;
• the skills of teamwork necessary for future learning and work are learned over time;
• collaborative work improves one’s self-concept as well as one’s attitudes toward school and learning.

NoodleBib’s collaborative features have been designed to support the factors that nudge people toward interdependence and communities of practice:

• identified shared objectives
• concrete, attainable goals
• open and frequent communication
• common space that enables synchronous and asynchronous tasks
• learner-driven autonomy backed by continuous support (e.g., just-in-time, guided help, teacher-monitoring, feedback loops, and stable technology platform)
• software which facilitates information exchange, knowledge management and knowledge construction
• individual-, group- and self-assessment opportunities

When group members see benefits from their involvement with others, they are keen to participate, share resources and responsibilities, and even welcome accountability.

“…under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart.” – James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Anchor-Random, 2005 p. xiii

As usual, we’re eager for feedback and optimistic about the learning that can happen!

A few reminders to administrators of school/district subscriptions:

1. Folder revalidation. The first time a student logs in after August 1st, she is required to revalidate her personal folder. If your school/district has some form of automatic authentication enabled (Proxy server, IP authentication, referring URL authentication), this revalidation process may be transparent to the student. For example, if you have IP authentication enabled and the student is on campus the first time she logs in after 8/1, her folder will be revalidated automatically. However, if automatic authentication is not used, the student will see a screen after she enters her Personal ID and password that says that she must revalidate her personal folder.

The screen allows the student to skip the revalidation for up to 3 weeks. During that three-week period, the student can click the “Skip Revalidation For Now” button and proceed into her folder. After that date, this screen will no longer allow the student to skip the revalidation — she will need to enter the school’s current username/password in order to continue. Nothing is lost or deleted — the student is simply not permitted to log in until the revalidation occurs. Note that if automatic authentication occurs at any time during or after this period, the revalidation process will be complete and this screen will no longer be displayed to the student.

The purpose of “revalidation” is to prevent (or discourage) students who have graduated from a school to log back in to their old folders. Only current students should be using a school’s or district’s subscription. This brings us to our next reminder:

2. Change school/district passwords. In order for the revalidation process to work well, administrators of school/district subscription should change subscription passwords at least once every two years. And July tends to be the best time to do that. If you do it in the middle of the school year, students will once again be prompted to revalidate their folders, which leads to confusion. To change the password, log in to the subscription management area (e-mail us if you don’t know how), click “Subscription Management” and then “Change Subscription Password(s).”

3. Time zones and other NoodleBib customizations. With the addition of time zones in the latest release, account administrators should log in the to the subscription management area and set the time zone if necessary. For schools in the United States, the time zone should already be set, but you should still check that we did that correctly, in particular for schools that are located in states covered by more than one time zone. All international schools should definitely log in and set the time zone appropriately. After logging in to the subscription management area, click the “NoodleBib Customization” link and select the time zone there. While you are on the NoodleBib Customization screen, go through and check the other settings as well.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Many of you write to us with your ideas for how to improve NoodleBib, and we listen! You’ll notice a few of them on the Notecards screen:

The changes are small but important:

1. Recycle bin. Accidentally deleted a notecard or (gasp) a pile of notecards? No problem, just click the Undelete button (next to the Delete button), select the notecards to restore from the list, and they’ll reappear at their last location on the Tabletop!

2. Longer notecard titles. In the previous version, it was often hard to distinguish two different notecards with similar titles, since we only displayed 9 characters of the title. In the new version, we display two lines and about 24 characters (can vary), which makes a night and day difference.

3. Move new notecards to the tabletop quickly. Students often create their notecards from the Bibliography screen, which is fine. But when they come to the Notecards screen, those new notecards all appear in the New Notecards region at the top-left, and the student must move them onto the Tabletop in order to begin working with them (making piles, moving them into the outline, etc.). A convenient new “Move 10″ button below the New Notecards region makes this a speedy process!

4. Selection count. Not all of your notecards may be visible on the Tabletop at once, since you only see a portion of the Tabletop at one time. So when you want to use one of the buttons at the top of the screen that act on selected notecards (Add to Pile, Link to Source, Tags, Delete, or Print) or you do a search and notecards matching your search criteria are selected, it isn’t always clear how many of your notecards are actually selected (they might be outside the viewable area). The new notecard count at the top-right of the tabletop eliminates any confusion, and a “Clear selection” link right below that allows you to quickly unselect all notecards (whether or not they are in view).

5. And last but not least, the “Print” option on the notecards screen now allows you to select exactly what fields you want to export/print from your notecards.

In our own experience, we’ve found that when we’re ready to move from note-taking to outline and first draft, printing the notecards without including the “Quotation” field can be a great way to avoid the temptation to plagiarize!

The update went smoothly last night. Tomorrow we’ll be telling you a bit about the next update coming in just a few weeks. Hint… Student Collaboration!

We’ll be taking the server offline for 2 hours this evening (Saturday, 7/24), from approximately 8:00 – 10:00 PM PST.

This week’s NoodleBib updates are complete. Please report any issues through the Helpdesk. We will be continuing our discussion of the new features on the blog this weekend, as well as providing some details about additional updates coming in the next few weeks.

We will be working to update the user’s guide and online tutorials over the next several weeks as well, so be aware that the new features are not yet covered in those resources.

Have a nice weekend!

With tomorrow evening’s update, students and teachers will see dates and times in NoodleBib in their local time zone. Log files and usage logs in the subscription administration area will also display in the local time zone.

Note to administrators of school/district accounts: If your school/district is outside the U.S., you will need to go to “NoodleBib Customization” in your subscription’s administration area to select the proper time zone for your location. Time zones for U.S. schools will be set automatically.

Some of our users have been using NoodleBib for 7 or 8 years. A student who created a personal folder in 5th grade is now entering senior year of high school. A college student student may be entering a graduate program. Many schools have been subscribers for 8 years, and teachers have accumulated hundreds of projects that students shared with them that are now displayed in the Lists Shared With Me folder.

Most users want to keep their old projects for future reference or as part of an academic portfolio. But as projects pile up, it makes it more difficult to find current work and can even begin to slow down the screen’s loading time. To solve this, we’re introducing archiving of both projects and shared class names (to be called “assignment drop boxes” in the new version).

Projects can be archived via the “Archive” button. Archived projects are displayed in an “Archived Projects” area (hidden by default, but expandable as shown in the screenshot):

Similarly, instructors and librarians can archive assignment drop boxes. Archived drop boxes no longer show up in the teacher’s “Lists Shared With Me” area and students can no longer share work with them, but a teacher can always unarchive a drop box to review student work from past classes, to find exemplars to show current students, or to add to their own portfolio.

We hope you’ll like the new archiving features!

Yesterday we described the student’s Dashboard, today we’re going to show you the new Paper feature. Both can be accessed from the NoodleBib navigation bar.

Currently a student can export their notes and a bibliography to a word processor. However, to function efficiently as a platform for research, NoodleBib needed a robust online composing space that a instructor (and collaborating students) could access. Many schools and colleges have told us that they are moving toward cloud computing with Google Docs being the online word processing tool of choice, so we felt confident that integration of Google Docs with NoodleBib would be embraced by our users.

We weren’t satisfied with a simple “Export to Google Docs” button. We’ve done a deeper integration. When a student with a Google account clicks the Paper button, a new document is created in the student’s Google Docs account, one that is automatically tied to the student’s project in NoodleBib. Tighter integration means that the student can return directly to a paper by clicking on the Paper button in the NoodleBib navigation bar or the Paper icon in the “Components” section of the Dashboard.

Even better, when a student shares a NoodleBib project with a teacher, the paper is shared too. The teacher has full access to the document and can use Google’s great new annotation tools to give feedback directly on the student’s working paper:

We’re pleased with our early testing but, as always, we encourage you to share your ideas and comments with us!

This Friday we’ll be doing the first of several NoodleBib software updates this summer. Each day this week we’ll post another blog entry introducing you to the new features.

First a little background…

As many of you know, NoodleBib began in 1999 as a tool to create bibliographies. After years of picky programming and focused, hard work (with lots of advice from the big three style editors and our users) we’re proud of the fact that NoodleBib is the most accurate, comprehensive online tool for creating MLA, APA, and Chicago-style source lists.

In 2006 we expanded our service to include online notecards. With the redesign of the notecards graphical interface and the addition of the outlining feature in the summer of 2009, the online notecards have become an integral part of the research process in thousands of schools. In fact, many schools now subscribe to NoodleBib for the notecards feature, and use the bibliography tool as an added benefit.

NoodleBib is quickly becoming a platform for student research rather than just a “bibliography composer.” As such, the need for a project overview screen (the Dashboard) is clear. Let’s take a look at this new feature:

The Dashboard provides:

• An overview of the project components (Bibliography, Notecards, and the Paper, which we’ll introduce tomorrow)
• A place for the student to write a research question and thesis statement
• Information about the assignment drop boxes and teachers that the project is shared with
• Teacher-selected relevant links (which could be a calendar, an assignment sheet, a pathfinder, blog, wiki, etc.)
• A student-created to-do list to keep track of tasks, assignments and milestones.
• Unified display of the teacher or librarian’s general observations, as well as specific comments linked back to the specific bibliography entry or notecard

Teachers and librarians will also discover that the teacher’s view of the student’s Dashboard is an efficient way to monitor progress and offer feedback.

As with all new features we add, we’ve kept this initial version of the Dashboard as simple as possible, to observe how it is used and to get your feedback. We look forward to your comments and suggestions for how we can make the Dashboard even more useful.

There will be some downtime the evening of Friday, July 23rd, from approximately 9:00-11:00 PM PST. During this time we will be doing the first of several NoodleBib updates planned this summer. We will be revealing details about the improvements and new features on the blog this week, so stay tuned!

Note: These updates are complete as of 11:30 PM PST, 7/23/10.