NoteFish

• How will this technology support and improve teaching and learning outcomes?

One of the problems that I have faced while working with students on the constructivist approach to online research is keeping their information well organized. They will either just get the web site, copy anything and everything, or more often then not have a couple pages of information that they have no idea where they got it from. With NoteFish an online note gathering tool that should be a part of any ones 2.0 suite students can gather in a more organized manner. It does more than this. It is web based and not computer dependant, for the most part. You can save the information in the site rather than in some word processing file that is tied to a computer. Unless you try and email it or copy it just to find out the next computer will not open it. This will make it easy for students to carry on their research or gathering at other locations. As a teacher you hope that your students can do some work at home so that you have more time to do the things that need done together. NoteFish does have software that you will want to have loaded on any computer that you use, but you don't have to do this to access it. The potential road blocks that I see here are access and authority. Two problems often faced by teachers. Teachers may get access to the site but they will encounter roadblock if they want to add software since they do not possess the authority to do so.

So, the better outcomes for both the teacher and the students is organization and portability. Students can concentrate on the project rather than the technical task of compiling and organizing data in a tool designed for word processing. The hope would be that students could engage in better and more productive constructivist activities where more and better quality work is done in any given time span.

• Does this technology provide students with the digital literacies required to live and work in contemporary society?

Yes, students will need to practice evaluating sites for usefulness and appropriateness. Students need to know how to navigate and decode information found on site. As it is, students have a hard time with an informational text, like a History Book. Though the web has more information and tools, students need to know how to find and use the tools, and they need to be able to process larger amounts of information that, in may cases, is not as well thought out and organized as information from a textbook.

NoteFish will help students greatly in this area. They will be able to keep track of useful sites, and then practice highlighting and copying the most important and useful information. Later, they will be able to go back and synthesize the data they found and organize it in NoteFish. So. literacy for web site and informational text will be aided by this organizational and collection tool.