Speaking of Google Docs, we’ll be releasing an update to the Google integration within the next couple of weeks that allows students and teachers to use Google Apps for Education accounts. Currently, NoodleBib will not permit you to use a Google Apps for Education account (only a personal Google account). Stay tuned!

As a side note, we’ve been looking at the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style to determine what changes will be required in NoodleBib. We’ll post to the blog when we have a timeline worked out for that.

8/4/10, 8:00 AM – Some maintenance has already started, and the site may be unavailable at times throughout today. We apologize for the inconvenience today — unfortunately this wasn’t something that could wait for the weekend. If you are unable to access the site, please try again in an hour.

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!

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.

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 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!

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.

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!