May 22 2007
Next year…….
This year is not even over yet and I’m already thinking about next year. I’m thinking about new things I want to do and how I’ll do the old stuff better.
One thing I want to do better next year is having my kids take notes – Reading classes and the 8th grade Computer class. Reading classes need to take notes on literary terms and things specific to each story or novel that we read. I would LOVE to have them take notes online and be able to collaborate on those notes. I could use a wiki – we used wikis this year and it worked pretty well, but the kids are still very focused on changing fonts and colors and stuff. That would be a problem anywhere, anyway.
Then I thought about using an online note taking tool. I read about a few and NoteMesh looked interesting, but it’s really more for college students and I’m just not sure it’s right for Middle Schoolers. Then I read an article about the new Zoho Notebook (beta). It looks really cool and I played around with it a bit tonite. I could set up books and share them with my students. I can set some books or pages to be read only if I want them to see info, but not be able to edit it. In order to have control and for safety issues, I will make each of my students a gmail address using the +name feature
(add another name to your gmail email and it acts like a separate name, but all mail comes to the main email ex: you have a gmail account for username@gmail.com. For my student emails I use username+studentname@gmail.com. All the email for the students comes to my gmail account)
Zoho has some other really cool tools that I’d like my students to use next year too; Writer, Show, Planner and a few others. I wish Zoho Challenge (Test creator) was free – I’d love to do online testing too. I’m sure that I can find somewhere to do that 
I’d love to hear thoughts and ideas about my idea of online collaborative notetaking. Maybe I could even find another class that is reading, or would be willing to read, the same novel with me next next year.
2 responses so far
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You’re idea of collaboration has prompted me to revisit my administrators wiki and renew my effort to get other administrators using it. I think that using such online tools is awesome and a great idea that we should use much more. I also use ZohoNotebook and the other Zoho line of online tools. They are great. I’m hoping they come out with a desktop or something where all the tools are together. I like the Zoho group of tools, except for GoogleReader and gmail, than others that I have tried.
Karen & kwhobbes : Thanks for using Zoho and writing about us! Nice seeing that you are putting Zoho to good use. We would be glad hearing your feedback