So I’ve been meaning to get a chance to play with the Zoho Notebook beta but, as you recall, I’ve been working on balance. Somewhat. This morning I carved out 24 minutes to play, and here is the result.
Now I gotta tell you, while there are still some little glitchy things going on, (like this embed function doesn’t seem to be doing the trick) I think this has some major po. Here’s a direct link to the “book” where you can see there are page tabs down the side to add more information and create some wild kind of portfolio.
I’d love to hear/see what other folks are doing with this…
Technorati Tags: zoho_notebook, learning, tools
Will,
This is pretty cool. I have not seen it before, but I can already think of a couple applications for my 3rd graders. I can see this as a sort of online journal for my students, to publish and then accept comments from other students, although the issue of email addresses to sign up and also security come to mind as I am thinking out loud. It seems like an easier equivilant to students having their own blog, because it is so easy to embed content- an area which has been difficult for my student bloggers in the past. I also can see it used as a way to differentiate- I could build a notebook to re-teach specific curriculum for students, embed video tutorials, add helpful websites to reinforce specific skills, or create special projects or tasks that could include task pages, with a chance for students to embed their audio reflections about what they have learned by completing the tasks. Hmmm, something else to play with this summer- thanks for sharing!
Will, this is really neat. How do you hear about the differnet widgets that you write about?
I really like zoho polls. One of my 4th grade teachers used it in class one time so now I use it all the time with my staff. We voted on our theme for next year, planning for next year’s holiday party, and staff shirt preferences. Here is a link to my school blog with the zoho poll embeded. I don’t think I closed the poll so you can vote if you want to and it won’t count against my staff. They are gone for the summer and done voting! 🙂
http://mmiller7571.edublogs.org/
If you want to scroll back through my blog you can view my other polls. I just can’t remember the dates I posted them. Much easier than putting paper polls in mailboxes, collecting then, tabulating them etc. If this stirs any other creativity please let me know.
One more thing…….you can change the size of the image by going into the embedded code and changing the numbers. That will help the entire picture show up. I had to make my poll taller and narrower to show up on my blog.
Thanks!
Wow. Since you posted the link to the screencast demo of Zoho Notebook a few months ago, I’ve been checking to see if it had gone live every few weeks. I’m excited to see that it’s finally here. At my previous job, I had a Tablet PC and I became a big fan of OneNote. This de-couples OneNote from the tablet and best of all, it’s free!
I think for something like this to really work in schools, though, it has to be adopted on a wide scale. When kids start keeping notes, multimedia fragments, projects, etc. from multiple classes/subjects in one giant notebook, they will really start to make connections. My favorite part of OneNote is the ability to search through all of your notes from dozens of meetings and to find information you’ve recorded on a given topic. Doesn’t look like that feature is in Zoho Notebook yet, but hopefully it will be soon.
I think this platform has the potential to make digital portfolios feasible for the masses.
By the way, Zoho Projects is a really cool little app, too. A relatively simple way to create custom database-backed web apps.