I'm in love with Nota

There have been a number of cool applications that I've come across recently, but I really want to sing the praises of Nota. I love it! According to its developers, it is

 "a unique, cutting-edge collaborative web platform that allows users to create, share and collaborate on presentations and virtually any other form of online material. Using Nota’s proprietary toolset, users can instantly integrate text, video, maps, clip art, photos from web album or on the local computer, or license-free images from Flickr, and material from an ever-expanding array of sources. Users can then instantly embed their work in Facebook or blogs, and can share and collaborate with friends."

In other words, everything you ever dreamed of. Well, that may be overstating it a tad. Today I used it to take notes at a professional development workshop led by Rochelle Jensen, E-Learning Advisor from the University of Waikato. The workshop focused on the uses of ICT in Education, and I found that taking notes on Nota, I could create moveable text boxes, grab a youtube clip (that Rochelle had shared) by doing a quick search on the sidebar and positioning it wherever I wanted on the page, and I could hyperlink to all relevant pages with ease. Here are my notes from today's session (heaps of excellent links from Rochelle, by the way, so worth having a look!).

What's more,  a reader can make comments on a particular part of the page by clicking on it, making it an extremely useful feedback tool. It's also fully embeddable (is that a word?). In fact, rather than just link to it, I'll try embedding it now...

Great! Even embeds with scrolling. Try clicking on it and see if you can comment, or scroll through the comment bubble options. Very cool. Please check it out, especially their one minute demo video and this page about educational uses. I'm thinking about the possibilities of using this as a platform for e-portfolios with my class, as one possible use. My wiki of choice for now.

Another thing I'm using Nota for is to report on a small scale action research project I'm undertaking for my MEd which is about the effect blogging might have on learners' motivation to write. When I finish I'll post a link here at Webb-ed Feet so that you can read it if interested.

On the blogging note, this week has seen my class set up individual blogs using David Warlick's classblogmeister. So far so good, a few teething problems which I'll save for another post, but on the whole, great to be getting them connected. I'll provide links once the posting really gets going. 

In the meantime, go and sign up at Notaland and have a play!