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Have you ever wanted to allow students to take and share notes, add media to notes, and just provide a web2.0 notetaking experience?  Enter MediaBird for Moodle.  This plugin allows for the student to take notes on anypage of your moodle install.  Grab web resources, videos, etc. and place them into a notepad that can be shared by a group.  Once I get Moodle on the new server, I will be adding this resource for our setup.  Looks to be very cool!!!

From the MediaBird Website…

How does Mediabird work?

Mediabird is an collaborative online notepad featuring a question function. Commonly, notes are edited by a single person or a small group. Questions can directly be related to the notes and be discussed in place.

In our opinion, the Mediabird notepad is an extension for offline study groups and distance learning scenarios.

In our experience, the use of Mediabird has turned out to be a useful addition to study group scenarios and exam preparation. At the same time, we have seen that it is important for the users to have a guide showing them the basics of the application. The current best practise is to motivate the use of Mediabird by assigning the students a task to be done with the online notepad. With that approach, it is much easier for the students to understand the system and develop ideas themselves about how to use the system in a creative and productive way.

How can I use Mediabird in my seminar or class?

Using the collaborative note taking system, it is possible to solve various types of tasks covering the spectrum ranging from pure note taking to supporting collaborative study group scenarios.

Exemplary Assignment: Creating a composition on a given topic

The goal of the learners is to do a research on a particular topic and to document their results using Mediabird.For instance, with the following assignment:

  1. Perform a brainstorming on the topic
    • What comes up to your mind related to the topic? Collect keywords and questions you relate to it and write them down.
  2. Check the given sources on the topic
  3. Create a chapter outline together
    • Create a rough structure based on which you want to write down your results later on
    • Create a note folder using Mediabird in which each chapter corresponds to a note sheet
  4. Writing out some text
    • Collect headwords to the particular aspects together
    • Separately write out the headwords
  5. Reflecting and reviewing the results
    • Go through each other’s drafts in Mediabird and insert annotations or questions
    • Discuss the results together and update the shared notes accordingly

In what way does Mediabird support exam preparation?

The main advantage of Mediabird over classic notepads and most of the online solutions is that it allows for relating questions to notes.

Questions that have been inserted during the term can be used to prepare exams. Unsolved questions serve for getting deeper into the study matter. The solved questions, in turn, can directly be memorized using the card box. The PDF export can be used for some offline revision.