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NoodleTools How-to Guide: Work on a Collaborative Project

Tutorials that show you how to create a personal ID, work with projects, create citations, and do other tasks in NoodleTools

How to Set Up a Collaborative Project with Your Classmates

Water ski show at Cypress Gardens in Florida - Britannica ImageQuestIn NoodleTools, you can work together with your classmates on a project. You will be able to share source references, notecards, the outline, and the Google Doc  linked to the project. You can also exchange comments or questions about the project.

On this page:

How to Work on a Collaborative Project with Other Students
How to Write and Respond to Project Comments
How to Restore an Accidentally-Deleted Project
How to Share a Google Document with Another Student or Your Teacher

How to Work on a Collaborative Project with Other Students

Overview

In NoodleTools, you can work together with your classmates on a project, each of you contributing to the list of sources, notecards and an outline. You can also exchange comments or questions about the project.

To start a collaborative project, one student creates the project in their user account and then adds the other student(s) as described here.

Step 1.

On the Projects screen, Click the "Add" (plus sign) or current icon in the "Sharing" column for the project.

How to work on a collaborative project, figure 1

Step 2.

In the panel that opens, click the Add student button under "Student Collaboration."

How to work on a collaborative project, figure 2

Step 3.

Enter the student’s Personal ID in the text field. Note that since West Sound Academy uses Google for access, the student's Personal ID is their Google email address.

By default, the student will be a full collaborator (equal access to edit the project as yourself). If you want the student be able to view your project and add comments, but not be able to add or change anything else, select the peer-reviewer option.

How to work on a collaborative project, figure 3

Step 4.

Click Done. If you want to additional collaborators, click Add student and enter the Personal IDs for each one.

Step 5.

Keep in mind that students you add to the project will also have access to project and source attachments that you add. If you've included the share URL of a Google Doc as an attachment, and your collaborator(s) need access to it, make sure you also configure sharing of that file within Google Docs to allow read/edit/comment access as needed. For more help with that see: How to Share a Google Document with Another Student or Your Teacher 

Step 6.

On the Projects page, a collaborative project is identified by their collaborators' initials in the "Sharing" column. To change the project collaborators, click on the circles to open the panel.

As work is done in the project, you can open this panel at any time and see the number of citations and notecards created by each contributor.

How to work on a collaborative project, figure 4

Step 7.

As you work together on a collaborative project, your team members will use their NoodleTools accounts to contribute work or make changes to the project. When another student has the project open, you will see a “Who's online” link below the top navigation. Click on the link to view who is working on the project. If “Who's online” is not visible, it means that you are the only one currently viewing the project.

How to work on a collaborative project, figure 5

Step 8.

How to work on a collaborative project, figure 6

On the Notecard Tabletop, as team members move notecards or created piles, your own screen will update to reflect those changes. You may be restricted from editing particular notecards or piles depending on what collaborators are working on.

Hint 1

When sharing a collaborative project with the teacher, only one of the students working on the collaborative project needs to share the project with the teacher's inbox (as opposed to each collaborator individually).

Hint 2

If you are a collaborator on a project, selecting the project and deleting it from your Projects screen simply removes you as a collaborator. The project will still remain visible to your team members. If you accidently delete a collaborative project from your account, you will need to ask one of your team members who still has access to re-add you as a collaborator to the project.

Hint 3

If you were not logged in when changes were made to the project, you can view project updates by clicking the date in the "Updated" column to open a 30-day log. The "Project history log" shows the most recent activity at top.

Hint 4

To add or respond to a comment or question about the project, see "How to write and respond to project comments."

How to Write and Respond to Project Comments

Overview

When you share a project with a teacher's inbox, you can send comments to and respond to questions from that teacher. Likewise, if you've added collaborators to the project, you can read and respond to their comments. Note that if no student collaborators have been added and the project has not been shared with an inbox, you will not see the commenting features described below.

Comments are permanently added to the project and cannot be deleted, so be responsible with what you choose to say!

Comment fields are displayed by default, but if you do not see them (or wish to hide them), click the eye icon at the top of the screen and check (or uncheck) the "Comments" box.

Step 1.

If your comment or question is about a specific source citation, navigate to Sources and enter your comment/question in the comment area below the source citation.

How to write and respond to project comments, Figure 1

To add a comment or a question about a specific notecard, you can do that from the Sources screen as well. You can show/hide notecards under a particular source citation by clicking the orange notecard icon in the "Notecards" column (or show/hide all notecards via the eye icon at the top of the screen (checking or unchecking the "Notecards" box).

Alternatively, you can navigate to the Notecards Detail View and enter your comment/question in the comment area at the bottom of the notecard in the center area (after selecting the notecard in the left panel).

How to write and respond to project comments, Figure 2

Step 2.

When a teacher or collaborator responds or leaves new comments for you, the Comments option in the blue panel on the left will display a number in red. The number indicates how many comment threads are in a "to-do" state (meaning that someone has written a comment that you haven't responded to or marked "done" yet).

Note that if you are on the Projects screen, clicking "Comments" in the blue side-panel will first prompt you to select which project you want to view the comments for. If you have a particular project open already, clicking "Comments" from the Sources or Notecards screens will just open the comments panel right away.

Step 3.

The comments panel opens on the right.

How to write and respond to comments, Figure 3

The panel displays:

  • A "general project comments" thread (whether or not that is currently in a "to-do" or "done" state)
  • Any source citation and notecard comment threads that are in a "to-do" state (i.e. someone has written a comment that you haven't responded to or marked "done" yet). Open the "Source Comments" or "Notecard Comments" sections by clicking on those headers.

You can click on the blue link at the top of any citation or notecard comment thread to open the associated citation/notecard in the main panel to the left.

Remember: The comments panel only displays source and notecard comments that are in the "to-do" state. You can view ALL source and notecard comment threads by viewing them under each citation and notecard on the Sources screen.

Step 4.

To respond to feedback, type into the text field and click Send. The "To-do" toggle will automatically change to "Done." Alternatively, if you don't feel a written response is necessary, you can just click the "To-do" toggle to change it to "Done."

Note: If you click the "To-do" toggle and a red message is displayed (see below), it means that your teacher wants you write out a response and click Send, not just mark it done.

How to write and respond to comments, Figure 4

How to Restore an Accidentally-Deleted Project

Overview

When deleted, projects are moved into a recycle bin (not trashed permanently), so no matter what happens you can be assured that your hard work is not lost!

Step 1.

On the Projects screen, click the "More options" icon button (three dots) and select "Undelete."

How to restore an accidentally-deleted project

Step 2.

In the "Restore deleted projects" window, check the box next to the project you want to restore. Click the Undelete button.

Restore deleted projects

Step 3.

The restored project appears on your Projects screen.

Note about collaborative projects: When you delete a collaborative project, your access to that project is removed but the project will remain accessible to the other students. The project will not be in your recycle bin -- instead of "undeleting" it, you will need to ask your classmate to re-add you as a collaborator on that project.

How to Share a Google Document with Another Student or Your Teacher

Overview

When you add a link to an online document (such as Google Doc) as an attachment to a shared NoodleTools project, you also need to verify that the students or teachers with access to the project have permissions to view that document.

Step 1.

In your browser, go to Google Drive and open the Google Doc.

Step 2.

Click the blue Share button.

How to share a Google document, Figure 1

Step 3.

On the "Share with people and groups" popup, enter the email address(es) of the teachers or collaborators who require access (if you aren't sure of their email addresses, or a number of people at the school will likely need access, skip to Step 4). You can define what permissions each person has by selecting Viewer, Commenter or Editor from the dropdown menu to the right of each email.

How to share a Google document, Figure 2

Step 4.

By default, Google documents are shared with "Restricted" status, meaning that the only people who can view your document are the specific ones you add. If you wish to allow anyone at your school/district/organization who has the document link to be able to view it (so that you do not need to add individual email addresses), you can select that option in the "Get link" section of the popup. For example, in the screenshot below, we are are permitting anyone in our organization to view the document if they have the special document link. Click Done to finish.

How to share a Google document, Figure 3

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