When starting a research assignment students often turn to Google. Even teachers do – you do right? And often times I wonder about the credibility of where they get their info from. Google makes it easier to keep it in check with Google Notebook. Let’s take a look at it’s features and then explore it’s possibilities for students AND teachers.

Let’s say you’ve already gone to google.com/notebook, downloaded the small installation file (you’ll have to register for a google account… you want this anyway since you will want to share and collaborate on the notes that you take), and installed it. You’ll notice a new little icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Go on and click on it to open the notebook.

Your empty notebook should open up. Let’s explore some it’s features.

Minimize Notebook

Close Notebook

Detaches Notebook from screen corner

Manually enter text for notes

List of your current Notebooks. You can create a new on for each new project. For this guide I will select Create New Notebook and title it Google Notebook. It now appears in the Notebooks panel.

Now to begin with adding the notes. I’ve found some good information about Google Notebook on Wikipedia that I would like to add. I simply highlight the text, right click and send to notebook.

The text you highlighted should appear in the notebook. Notice that a link also appears at the top of the clip. This can be clicked to go back and check the source.

This also works with pictures the same way. Right click on the desired picture and send to notebook. Notice the picture appears in your notebook. Also notice that clicking on the picture allows you to resize it.

Each of the items that you send to the notebook have the option of adding your own comments to help keep them sorted or to add your own thoughts. Just click anywhere on the entry and an add comment link will show up at the bottom.

Now that we have something to work with we can take a look at sharing and collaborating. To do this you need to visit your notebook’s homepage located under tools.

This will show a full page version of your notebook. Here you can choose how to share your work. You can email a link to someone for collaboration or simply publish it for viewing. Emailing a link for collaboration allows others to make changes while publishing it makes it like a webpage for others to only view what you have done. For either you can choose to automatically send a email to whomever you would like to view it. Keep in mind that anyone can simply view the research that you publish, but to collaborate they must have a google account set up as well.

Where can you go with this? As a teacher you can use it for your own research and share it with your department for collaboration. Or you could have your students use it for their research. They do the research and send you a link. You are able to view their sources and work with them as they research their topics.

Leave your thoughts in the comments.