NoteShare - 1.7.0

NoteShare is a superior application for students to do collaborative projects. In this semester, I expect students to research and work on projects in school and at home in our advanced Spanish classes. NoteShare opens in "notebook" form with dividers, tabs, and pages that can be added behind each divider. Therefore the structure of NoteShare allows students to give special attention to the organization to their project. Further, each page allows writing to be structured in an outline before each entry is fleshed out as a paragraph.

When students add an image, they use an option-drag with the file from the desktop to drop and set the picture into the notebook. The picture can be scaled by using a "Control-click" on the picture, and then by selecting one of the scaling percentages. If I call for my students to create exhibits or galleries from the internet, they copy and paste a URL into an entry on a new page of a notebook and double click on the "@" sign that appears in the margin to open a webpage within the notebook. More importantly, my students can annotate the webpage by writing in an entry above the displayed website. This is very important for teachers like myself who are trying to get students to offer proof they have chosen authoritative sites.

The most unique feature of NoteShare is its ability to "Share" a notebook effortlessly. I work in an all girls school and find on the whole that many girls are not very skilled with new applications. However, in my assignments, they have no trouble creating a notebook and going to the "Sharing" menu and invoking the sharing of the document after supplying a password. As mentioned above, I have my students work collaboratively. The partner(s) in the group also go to the "Sharing" menu and select "Open a Shared Notebook" and type the password. The shared notebook springs open immediately. It takes much longer to type the words in this sentence than to open the shared notebook. The students sit next to each other and organize their project by creating new pages and adding headings for each. They research with Safari and use the "Services" feature of OSX to select text they need to compile on a research page. "Services" pastes the text and its source URL right into the designated page in NoteShare to hold these research notes.

One of the reviewers above (Mr. Hill) is dead wrong about how users work in NoteShare. In my experience, students in my classes work together and one types ideas during a brainstorming mode. The other student can click on the sharing icon and also type in her own turn. But as the project proceeds, the students do a division of labor. Once this stage is reached, then one student "clicks" on the pen and types on her page; the other partner opens another notebook and works on another portion of the research project. When they are ready to compile the work during the period, the second student copies and pastes the text into the shared document or, if more than just text, the student simply drags the "folio" icon, shaped like a suitcase, to the shared document's page and all images, text, and links emerge as a new page. The turn taking in NoteShare is effortless, because the Auto-Edit mode (originally set during the Sharing startup) enables group interaction and sets the pen time out feature (so no one can hog the pen).

All in all, the students have worked smoothly in NoteShare after I have given them instruction in sharing, outlining, adding pages, dragging images, adding URLS and links, and compiling the notebook with a partner's work as described above. Again, I don't think these groups of 15 to 17-year-old girls are sophisticated in computer use and so any teacher will appreciate the ease of use of NoteShare. The students get right down to work and are productive. As a teacher, I can also open any of the shared notebooks to see how the research is going (I have a list of all the passwords). Then it's a matter of moving around the classroom and conferencing with the students who need help. This way I don't have to interrupt the work flow of teams who are doing an excellent job by elbowing them aside while I read their current draft in Spanish. (I do give praise though and let them know I am impressed with what they have created so far).

In one project with 10th graders, I had them write scripts for a play designed around an interview for a job. The partners in this assignment took either the character of the employer or the interviewee, and, sitting next to each other, wrote the alternating set of lines. Each character had his/her own color to designate who was doing the speaking. As part of the assignment, the partners had to inject humor in Spanish which is not always easy and not based on a literal translation of English-to-Spanish. With NoteShare, the students could talk and try out their lines on each other. In short, NoteShare drives up written and oral language in ways that teachers are always seeking but can rarely obtain in class.

Today, I am working with another project in two sections of Spanish IV classes. The students are researching a Hispanic artist, reading about his or her life, finding out about the genre of painting the artist is associated with, and using "Services" to pull in different sources from Safari onto one page. The students will do the writing next week by dividing their research into headings and deciding which headings they will complete. They have five images of the artwork to add. The students place all of their references on a Bibliography page using our MLA guide. This must be meticulously done without dropped references. In NoteShare, the linking feature permits me to check the reference on the page I read by directly going to the Bibliography and back using the return link feature. The program permits my students to stay organized for writing and to hold their research in separate sections. We don't have a 1:1 laptop program at this school (just laptops in a cart). When they write at home, students do the work in e-mail and copy and paste their writing into the NoteShare document the next day.

Once the projects are done, I will place them on a machine I use to serve NoteShare projects. To do this, I will compile all the notebooks into one big notebook. Then I will launch NoteShare and open the notebook and invoke sharing. Students can look at their classmates' work anywhere in school (or at home if they know the IP number and have a copy of NoteShare). Alternately, I can export the compiled notebooks into a "Web Notebook" and place this into my web site. For the current project, I will share the URL with my students so they can show their parents the final project and all the artwork that is visible--everything exports smoothly into the "Web Notebook" and can seen with any browser even on a Windows machine. I have all of my courses online as "Web Notebooks" for use at home or school.
In school, my notes, assignments, and readings are shared from the NoteShare server (an old G4 desktop behind my desk). One notebook, originally generated in NoteTaker, and now shared in NoteShare is 400 pages. There is no conversion needed for NoteTaker documents. I just open them now in NoteShare.

The students enjoy working in NoteShare and they interact naturally with it once they have spent 10 getting used to the fact they are editing the same document. The same reviewer (Mr. Hill) complains that NoteShare/NoteTaker is buggy. In my experience with more than 60 projects in Spanish, I have never seen NoteShare crash or close unexpectedly even though our school network is sometimes sluggish and can regularly make my email program crash. Students may have forgotten their password or neglected to start up sharing of their notebooks, but these issues are due to user error. There is no wasted time. If the reviewer had bugs, he obviously didn't report his bug or use the tech support line which is attentive and generates quick responses.

I highly recommend NoteShare without reservation to any teacher whether in Middle or Secondary School. The 30 day trial version of NoteShare is risk free. The program has even greater potential for higher ed. where most students go to college with laptops.