If you haven’t tried the electronic dropbox feature in NoodleBib/NoodleTools, check out my tutorial on how you can set up your own teacher/assignment dropbox and enable students to share their Works Cited list, notecards, and a Google Document associated with a project list with you and/or multiple teachers (wonderful for teacher and librarians to BOTH provide feedback!). I see this feature of NoodleBib as a way to provide specific feedback to students and as a formative assessment tool for learning to use with students.
What would make this feature even better is if students could respond to the teacher feedback and/or have some type of commenting feature similar to what is in Google Docs to track conversations and feedback for learning–perhaps this will be a future enhancement? While I’ve provided feedback on print copies of Works Cited lists and electronic notecards and assisted with the editing of student papers using the discussions and commenting features in Google Docs, I’ll be undertaking my first effort at collaborative electronic assessment using this feature next week with Susan Lester as our Media 21/Learning 21 students hit their first Works Cited/ notecard checkpoint this Friday, April 1; each group is working on a collaboratively constructed project in NoodleTools (see Chapter 6 in the NoodleBib guide under “student collaboration”), and each member of a collaborative project can see all feedback provided that Susan and I provide. I’m looking forward to the process and listening to student feedback on how this method of formative assessment works for them once we return from spring break in mid-April!
Written instructions are provided in the NoodleBib Users Guide in Chapter 6 under “Sharing Projects” and “Teacher Instructions”; student instructions are provided in this chapter as well.
The Unquiet Librarian 
This is great, Buffy. Thanks, as always, for sharing your thinking. I am struggling with this – experimenting with facebook as a research log this year, changing the assessment up, working on making the project itself feel more relevant to students, but I am floundering a bit. So thanks! This help a lot.
:-)ML
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I’m right there with you—we’ve used a variety of tools, but because this particular assignment is collaborative, we thought it would be a little more seamless to use NoodleTools for the Works Cited and notecard formative assessments. Most students are also bookmarking to their Symbaloo mixes, too, so we’re trying to balance a combination of tools. It’s always a work in progress!!! 🙂
Buffy
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Great point about needing a way for students to reply back to teacher comments. I was working with classes last week and a teacher was asking about that very thing!
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We’re especially interested right now in hearing about ways to improve the collaborative features within the student groups, among the the coaching teachers and between both groups. As you probably know our new software releases and major major upgrades and enhancements occur over the summer so that educators won’t feel as if they’re trying to learn something new while they’re in the middle of their teaching a big project. Buffy’s idea about enhancing the collaborative features to track teachers’ feedback and students’ responses makes gathering formative assessment so sensible! I wonder how people feel about doing this for the interchanges within the group — this strikes me as a bit more problematic, but I would love to hear some discussion of this. Will it help you evaluate group dynamics? Pick out the slackers? Or are the ways we display individual efforts sufficient for assessment purposes? As Buffy knows, close observation and thoughtful feedback to our team from teachers and librarians has shaped the way we develop NoodleBib – we’re all ears, please write us!
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