PreKinders Blog

I came across a really neat web 2.0 tool recently called Zoho Notebook. This is something I think would be helpful in organizing lesson plans and activities, particularly thematic units. It can be used to collect and save web clips. For instance, if you find several websites with a bug theme, and you only want to save the ideas from those sites that you like best, you can highlight and copy photos and text from the site and add them to your Notebook. You can also type in your own ideas, so that your Notebook would be a combination of all of the best ideas you’ve collected: your own as well as ideas from the web.

This is how it works: You click “New Book” to create a Notebook, and then begin adding pages to your book by clicking “Add Blank Page”. Within the pages, you can add text, images, audio, video, urls. You can also draw on the pages using the free hand tool, line tool, or shape tools. When you add urls, it actually adds the entire webpage to your Notebook, rather than just a link. Notebooks can be kept private, shared with people you choose, or published publicly.

I have created a sample that I’ve published so you can see the possibilities of what you can do with it. There’s probably more than what I’ve discovered. This is not one of my real Notebooks, it’s just a sample (I would not publish a real Notebook because of copyright issues for the web clips I save from various sites). These Notebooks can be organized in any way, but I organized mine with these pages: Rhymes, Small Group, Centers, Printables, Photos, Videos, Links. Access my Sample Bug Theme Notebook.

Another positive side to this is that your theme unit Notebooks would be online, and you could access them at home, school, or anywhere. Zoho has other useful apps you might want to check out. If you don’t have PowerPoint on your computer, you can create slideshow presentations using Zoho Show.

Please note this is not an advertisement for Zoho. Just something I found, thought was useful, and wanted to pass along.