Thing 16: You Pick!

Ok - I admit I had a terrible time picking!  I just wasn't sure what to do or accomplish here.  Finally I decided that I would offer my students the joy of learning to use something old in a new way!  So, I offered a 'class' to my kids that have already graduated and are in college on the new features of our favorite NoodleTools!  I also used this lesson with my Juniors and Seniors but it seems that the alumni were much more interested because they are actually seeing the reality of what I said in high school is really true about college - you must cite CORRECTLY or it's not good!

For those of you who don't know, NoodleTools is a subscription citation tool but it's so much more than that.  It has three levels of citations available - beginning, junior, and advanced - to allow students at all levels to become expert citers!  It offers students choices of APA, MLA, Chicago, etc., and there are help boxes with each field to tell students where to look to find the information they need and how it should look when they type it in.  It allows for annotations and even helps students know how to create their in-text citations.  After you enter your citation information, NoodleTools will print your bibliography and provide all the formatting including alphabetizing, spacing, italics, etc. 

New features of NoodleTools allow students to create their own timeline/checklists of items that need to be completed, create notecards, use the tags in the notecards to drop and drag into an outline, start a citation directly from a website with iCyte, and share and collaborate with faculty or other students.  NoodleTools also allows students to link to GoogleDocs to write and share their paper.  Teachers and students can leave notes/suggestions for students and they have added a highlighting and archive feature so that if a page is taken down you can still access it and, like Diigo, highlight for notes.  I think the iCyte and outlining features were the most popular with the college students but the notecards are really great for the high school crowd as well. 

In the span of a 40 minute class I was able to show the students all the new features and have them explore and on their own.  NoodleTools is truly a collaborative, full-service citing service and WELL worth the little bit we pay for it.  Their rates are really low!  A much better resource for teachers and students than citation machine or so of the other freebies out there in my opinion. 

The opportunity to pick allowed to see with new eyes an old tool and allowed my students, both current and former, an opportunity to expand their resources when it comes to citing responsibly.  Thanks for the opportunity and freedom with the module.