Catch of the Day - Nota - 18 Aug 09

Today's catch is Nota, a dynamic whiteboard wiki.

Nota lets you mash your ideas and media together with others in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can quickly create multimedia presentations on your own or with more than 50 colleagues.

Nota has been used for educational purpose as an online collaboration tool that allows students and teachers to quickly create and share virtually any kind of document such as presentations, notebooks, reports , artwork, anything. Using Nota’s toolset, users can integrate text, video, maps, clip art, photos from web albums or on a local computer, or images from Flickr, and other sources. Users can then embed their work in webpages, wikis, or blogs, and can share and collaborate with other people. There's no limit to what students can express using Nota.

It’s free of charge, no software to purchase or install, and because Nota’s online, collaborative and real-time, student reactions, responses, and ideas can be integrated live into the document.

Unique Features

• Users can create visual presentations or notebooks in literally minutes using any web browser.
• Design and user interface are simple, intuitive, and can be mastered in minutes.
• Instantly combine virtually any kind of material, from any source.
• Materials can be shared and edited simultaneously with group members.
• Work is auto-saved and immediately published.
• Ideal for group projects and hands-on instruction – incorporate student responses into material as you develop it.

Creativity

Use the text tool to add titles, messages, and comments to your creations. Insert photos, videos or flash from your own files or Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps, Wikipedia articles, and more. Use the drawing tools to work on any object in the workspace. Upload PDFs, document files, and audio for sharing.

Collaboration

Create private or public notebooks and invite one, two, or dozens, of people to collaborate on a Nota project. Add as many pages as you want to a notebook.



To use Nota, you'll need to register. See the Nota Quick Start Guide.

The Computer History Museum: A Video Tour Plus

Located in Mountain View, CA, the Computer History Museum offers visitors the opportunity to see and experience one of the world's largest collections of computing artifacts. Their exhibits allow you to explore the computer revolution and its impact on the human experience.



The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer released by Commodore International in August, 1982, at a price of $595 (US) with 64K of RAM and a 1Mhz processor. The C-64 is the all-time best selling single personal computer.

The Johnniac was an early computer manufactured in the early 1950's by the Rand Corporation in California. It was one of several computers inspired by the IAS computer designed by noted mathematician John von Neumann (after whom it was named) at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. It was removed from service in February 1966.

In 1956, the first IBM 305 RAMAC was shipped. The RAMAC was the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard disk drive for storage rather than magnetic tape. More than 1000 systems were built before production ceased in 1961. Weighing more than a ton, it had a storage capacity of 5 megabytes.

IBM promotional video for the 305 RAMAC...


The SAGE system was developed by MIT in the late '50s with Air Force sponsorship to counter the threat of a manned bomber attack by the Soviets. It became operational by 1963 and remained in service until 1983. The project required over 800 programmers and the technical resources of some of America's largest corporations. With 60,000 vacuum tubes and weighing in at 250 tons, the SAGE system was the largest, heaviest and most expensive computer system ever built.

An Enigma machine is any of a number of advanced electro-mechanical rotor machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Several types of the Enigma machine were developed before and during World War 2. The most complex Enigma type was used by the German Navy. The machine has become well-known because Allied codebreakers were able to decrypt a huge number of messages which had been enciphered using the Enigma. The information gathered from this source was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort.

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Two New Google Tools

Google Labs has just introduced two new tools that many educators may find useful, Similar Images in Google Image Search and Google News Timeline.

Similar Images
Google Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the perfect image if you can't describe it in just the right words. Similar Images allows you to refine your image search with visual similarity, searching for images using pictures rather than words. By clicking the "Similar images" link under an image you will find other images that look like it.

Using visual similarity, you don't have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link below an image you like. For example, if you search for [jaguar], you can use the "Similar images" link to quickly narrow your search.

You might try exploring the pyramids of Egypt or discovering the Forbidden City. So if you see an image you like, but you're not sure how to describe it, just click the "Similar images" link to see more like it.

Want to know more? Check out this video tour.



Timeline
Google News Timeline organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can move through time by simply dragging the timeline. You can set the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or decades, or just include a time period in your query (i.e., "1977"). To see this in action, check out the results viewed by month in the summer of 2006.Google News Timeline can show results from many different sources, including both recent and archival news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, and sports scores and media like music and movies. You can view multiple sources simultaneously, allowing each source to lend context to the others.

Two Tools for Managing and Exploring Information

Over the weekend I found two online applications that seemed as though they could be very useful in an education context, TextFlow and eyePlorer.

TextFlow from Sweden's NordicRiver allows concurrent collaborative document editing supporting the modern way of working, where success depends on good collaboration in virtual teams that spread across physical and geographical boundaries.

TextFlow is easily accessible in most browsers and there is a downloadable desktop version as well which requires Adobe AIR. There are both free and paid versions. TextFlow features the ability to import Word and RTF files, export to Word and HMTL, directly publish on the web, manage seven concurrent versions, and a document portal for storage and access.
EyePlorer from vionto GmbH in Germany is an interactive, visual method of working with knowledge and information. Studies suggest that human thought has a strong visual component and that the brain can process images faster than textual information.



You enter a search term and eyePlorer quickly culls Wikipedia and generates a visual map of related terms. Mouse over one of these terms and a popup tells how that term is related to your original term. Furthermore, you can drag these popup facts into the notebook to collect and save information connected to your topic for later use.

EyePlorer is in beta and is free to use.

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