NoteShare Express

NoteShare from AquaMinds is a staple on the MLTI laptops here in Maine. Every educator 7-12 has the app on their laptops . . . and every 7-8 student in Maine as well. The notebook metaphor it uses makes that connection with past technologies which helps many to easily move on to the new powerful digital functionalities. NoteShare is one of those applications which allows new learners to use it quickly initially while at the same time having many additional powerful features under the hood for those wishing to explore further. (More Info)

For example, it allows created notebooks to be shared in many different ways. Notebooks can be shared and edited easily between teachers and students on their local networks as well as world-wide through IP addresses. Notebooks can also be published with a single click as an html document for the web. In addition, notebooks can be stored on a server for access. (More Info)

The one drawback had been that only people with Macs that had the NoteShare application could edit the documents. No more. Now we have NoteShare Express which opens up editing capabilities to anyone anywhere through a simple web browser . . . just about any web browser. This new feature can be experienced at the ACTEM server. Simply go to this address and use "actem" as a password. Choose the MaineEd category and then pick Demo_Playground to go to the sandbox. Feel free to mess around there, trying out this wonderful new feature. Add a new section, page or entry. Add and move text. Upload images and links. Discover the possibilities. (More Info)

Maine's educational technology association, ACTEM, is probably the best place for Maine schools and educators to go to acquire the necessary software to implement these enhanced capabilities. Craig Dickinson is the fine gentleman who will help you there.

Crystal Priest, president of ACTEM and keeper of the ACTEM NoteShare server, among her many, many other duties (where does she find the time?) is the resident expert on NoteShare servers and Noteshare Express. She can also point you in the right direction to individual school systems in Maine that have set up their own servers.

Scott Love, AquaMinds CEO, is unique, in my experience, in his approach to customer service. He works directly with his customers and users, always going that extra mile to answer questions, troubleshoot, and constantly improved his product based on user needs and requests. He listens and follows up. See AquaMinds Weblog. (Where does he find the time?)

Barbara Greenstone and Phil Brookhouse, statewide MLTI mentors, as well as many others throughout the State, provide excellent training in making the best use of NoteShare, focusing on student and teacher needs. Check out some of their own notebooks (toward the bottom of the sidebar list, password: "actem") at the ACTEM server.

What else should we know about NoteShare?

Earlier NoteShare Posts
NoteShare Resources at LIM Resources Wiki

The Known Universe

Scott Love of AquaMinds shares "The Known Universe":

"Teeming with life. Social, electronic digital life. That's how I see the Internet. Deep and mysterious at times but always rich in content and information. How does one find it and then share it? I like to use NoteShare as a tool for aggregating information and content but also using it as a terrific way to share and publish discoveries. From another point of view, one can easily imagine this same process of gathering resources (we called them readings in college) and creating the super syllabus of the 21st century course notebook. And I've seen evidence already by middle school teachers who are way beyond the experts and ivory tower researchers when it comes to integrating and exploring the vast information riches of the Internet for classroom use. Teachers and librarians are cool!" ~ Scott Love

Link to Noteshare Web Notebook, "The Known Universe"

AquaMinds Weblog: Web Agents, NoteShare and Collaborative List Building and Note-Taking

Ann Marie Quiron Hutton's Video Noteshare Tutorials
Noteshare Server for OS X

"There Ought to Be a Law"

There Ought to Be a Law

I had the opportunity to talk with Laura Richter today and learned of her latest powerful project. You might recall that I posted her notebook on doing local/oral history last week. If you think that was great, you must see this latest work:


There Ought to Be a Law

Educational Tools for the Movie

The Noteshare Notebook for the Movie

There Ought to Be a Law is an award-winning documentary by Anita Clearfield, Shoshana Hoose and Geoffrey Leighton on the theme of average citizen versus the government.

Anna Marshall - Artwork
Skowhegan Area Middle School

Related Noteshare Posts

Maine Local History Handbook

Interested in doing local/oral history with your students? Need a model to get you started? Check out Laura Richter's notebook for rich suggestions, templates and examples. This is a gem created in the MLTI Noteshare application and saved as web files. Laura is an expert in working with children in investigating local history as demonstrated at Our Town Skowhegan Maine.




Related Resources:

Oral History
Video Interviewing
Noteshare
iMovie Workshop
Maine Studies

Microorganisms & Noteshare

Amanda Leavitt of Gray New Gloucester Middle School shares her experiences using Noteshare in the study of microorganisms in her class. She starts . . . .

"I had a brainstorm! An epic moment, an epiphany, if you will. I was going to create a Note Share lab report notebook. In this notebook, kids would follow the basic format of the lab report, until the results section. There, they would narrate movies I had created using the digital microscope. Students would use the movies to describe what they saw, what they knew about microorganisms, and so on. It seemed like pure genius." Continued . . .

Noteshare . . . Handing-In Assignment

Ann Bell of Oxford Hills Middle School came back enthusiastic about using Noteshare after attending a workshop in Auburn with Barbara Greenstone. She has successfully created and shared over the local network her notebook on matter. Anne sees great possibilities with this tool in her daily classroom work. But she had a question that has me stumped:

Is there a drop-box function in the Noteshare book that allows only the teacher to see the completed assignment that has been completed and dragged (using folio) or copy/pasted by the student? She would prefer not to use the email route because of the distraction it might cause. Of course, the old "sneaker net" using a thumb drive could be a solution . . . but is there a simpler way? I vaguely remember hearing that there was a way during trainings, but after going through the help menus, couldn't seem to find the answer. Barbara? :) Anyone?

Middle School Noteshare Workshop Dates
Earlier Posts Relating to Noteshare
Noteshare Links at Learning in Maine Resources Wiki

Noteshare Training for Maine Middle School Educators

Info & Registration

Hancock Region:

* February 5 at Hancock County Higher Education Center, Ellsworth
* February 6 at William Cohen School, Bangor

MidCoast Region:

* January 29 at Great Salt Bay CSD, Damariscotta

Western Region:

* January 30 at Auburn Central Office
* February 4 in Dixfield at the Richardson Hollow Associates Building

York Region:

* January 31 at Biddeford Middle School

Noteshare Reprise

I worked with two 8th grade language arts classes Monday morning on the basics of Noteshare in my quest for Oxford Hills Middle School teachers and students to understand the power of this MLTI laptop application. We downloaded Barbara Greenstone's "Reading Journal" at the ACTEM Noteshare Server < noteshare.actem.org > using the Noteshare share menu and shared it on the network. I'm always amazed at how quickly students catch on to the utility of this versatile tool. The sessions culminated with students setting up classroom vocabulary notebooks. Sure wish I had more time to devote to Noteshare.

Any other happenings with Noteshare out there?

Earlier Posts on Noteshare

OHMS - Team Planning Time & NoteShare

View Larger Map

I took an hour today to work with a team of teachers at Oxford Hills Middle School on the basics of NoteShare. Every child on their team already has had the experience. Whenever it is presented to teachers, it always brings excitement, and ideas on utilization start to be cultivated. Having the ACTEM NoteShare Server up and running today was very handy in showing what is available out there. Tomorrow, during a professional day, I'll be using the admin password to enable sharing on the teachers' iBooks.

Noteshare Resources

ACTEM NoteShare Server

Crystal Priest of SAD #4 has set up the ACTEM NoteShare Server which gives us access to many excellent notebooks created by people in Maine. Many thanks to the excellent support and encouragement from Scott Love, president and developer of the program at Aquaminds.

The NoteShare application, which is on all MLTI laptops, is being discovered at an increasing rate by many teachers and students across the state. It is appreciated for its ability to pull together a variety of functions and resources in one place, organize them, and to then allow collaboration through several ways of sharing.

There is already quite a collection of quality notebooks. Barbara Greenstone and Phil Brookhouse have been working overtime in producing a large number of these books on a variety of topics. You really must check 'em out. :)

If I have this correct (Do correct me if I'm wrong, Scott), there are two ways of accessing the Maine server:

1. Through the NoteShare Application - Fire up Noteshare, go to SHARING:OPEN SHARED NOTEBOOK, PRESS THE + BUTTON, and add this address: noteshare.actem.org . Choose the notebook you are interested in and downloaded it to your computer desktop by going to FILE:SAVE TO, and if you wish, edit it to meet your needs. Check with your building tech person or teacher-leader for the password to these gems.

2. Through a web browser. This is read-only.

Additional Information

ACTEM on NoteShare

Do you have a NoteShare notebook to share with the rest of Maine's educators?

Send Crystal Priest a note and she'll set you up. :)

Workshop: Blogging in the Middle School Curriculum

This afternoon at the MAMLE conference I'm attending a workshop on blogging by Carl and Joyce Bucciantini from the Auburn Middle School. They have developed two great NoteShare notebooks on blogging which were offered to everyone via flashdrive. Good stuff!

AMS Blog Page

Caravan

cara·van· (kar′ə van′) (noun) 1.a company of travelers, esp. of merchants or pilgrims traveling together for safety, as through a desert. 2. a number of vehicles traveling together. 3. a large covered vehicle for passengers, circus animals, gypsies, etc.; van. 4. Brit. a mobile home or trailer

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word caravan, other than the Dodge Caravan, is the vision of the travelers on the silk road with perhaps a few camels thrown in for good measure. Dangers lurk everywhere.

But at Oxford Hills Middle School, a team of teachers has a tradition of using the caravan theme as a way of exploring countries around the world. Yesterday and today I have been presenting new tools that help to empower students and teachers in their explorations. This includes tools that help to find, evaluate, organize, process and present information.

It works like this: I spend a couple days in the classroom of one of the teachers on the team. As the kids cycle through his classroom from other classes on the team, I get the opportunity to not only show them some of these powerful tools, but the teacher gets to see the presentation 5 times. I'll also attend a planning period with all teachers on the team to repeat the work one more time. Doing this repeatedly creates a critical mass of people on the team who are fluent in the tools and thus greatly improves the chances of it being seriously used for curriculum projects. A simple model for encouraging integration.

The agenda for sessions included:

1. How to make a PDF and attach it to an email.
2. The wonders of MARVEL - making use of it for the Caravan Project
3. The Powers of Noteshare - how to use it for the Caravan Project
4. Setting up back-up server access for students.

Great fun! The kids are so quick to pick it up . . . and are enthusiastic to start making use of it in their projects.

Making a PDF on a Mac
MARVEL - Maine's Virtual Library
Noteshare Resources

School Culture

Every Wednesday morning at Mountain Valley Middle School in Mexico, Maine, is "late-arrival" teacher workshop time. This is a valuable time when everyone is fresh to work on ways to improve the school. One session a month is devoted to a literacy initiative with the Western Maine Educational Collaborative, as previously posted. Today was focused on school culture. MVMS has an enthusiastic committee called the MVMS Improvement Committee (formerly the Student Climate and Culture group). Not only have they created some areas to focus on each month, but they provide hands-on training for staff during the professional development time. In other words, there are some strong capacity-building activities that promote implementation, not just words alone.

Today we worked on team-building, cooperative learning activities and conflict resolution skills in small groups that could be used with students during flex-time. Congratulations to the team for excellent leadership. :) Good stuff that I'm sure will make a difference! You see. . . there is a double function here . . . teachers working as a team in order to promote teamwork with students.

Lindsay MacMillan, teacher at MVMS, created a Noteshare notebook called Flex Time with many great ideas. Here is the Web Notebook version. MVMS Librarian, Amy Ryder, added the library resources available to teachers and students.

Process Skills Resources
Student Aspirations: Eight Conditions

U.S. History - Digital Alternatives

Instead of buying the bound version of a U.S. History textbook, how about using some digital alternatives? Better yet, how about the real possibility of having students create their own history book using NoteShare or some other Web 2.0 tool?

WikiBooks: U.S. History
Digital History
1899 U.S. History Textbook
American History 102 - 1865 - Present
American Memory
A People's History of the U.S. - 1492 - Present
Primary Source Resources

Tools for Student Collaboration in Book Creation:

NoteShare Resources
Wiki Resources

Questions:

Suppose it could work? What would the issues be?