Google Notebook: The Lazy Way to Blog

Yesterday I was trying to catch up with my feeds and I came across a great post from Janet Clarey--Do You  Have a Learning Strategy for the Recession? This led me to think about recession-proofing your career, which led me on a hunt for some articles to post here.

Normally, what I would do is have one tab open to my blog post composition window and another for my search. I would then toggle between the two tabs to add links and comments to my post. But yesterday I wanted to get things done more quickly, so I created a new Google Notebook for my topic and started right-clicking on each page I wanted to save into my Notebook, creating a basic resource list in about 15 minutes. When I was finished, I realized that I could actually use my Notebook as a blog entry, simply by creating an introduction summarizing what I found. Then I could publish my Notebook and write a quick entry here (as I'm doing now) with a link back over to my public Notebook.

If you're blogging for learning, this could actually be a great ongoing strategy for research and resource kinds of posts. You can use your blog as a more accessible and searchable centralized portal to your research. The posts themselves, though, could be maintained as Notebooks. The advantage is that you can more easily add to and update your Notebooks without having to go back and redo posts. You can also move your link items to group them differently, as well as use tags to organize. Each time you add to your Notebook, it will automatically update your public page, so any "post" is always current. This keeps related resource and research items together, rather than having them scattered through several posts. You can then add reflections or comments directly into the Notebook as you continue to gather information.

You could do this sort of thing in a wiki, too, but what I like about Google Notebooks is that with the Firefox extension,  when I find new links or resources to add to the Notebook, I just have to right-click on them and they'll automatically be added. I can then add notes if I want to. Definitely the easiest way to pull things together.

You could also choose to share your Notebooks with other people, so they would be able to add resources as well.

This could work well for a collaborative project or if your department wanted to provide regularly updated resources to others in your organization. It might, for example, be a good quick way to do a "Buzzin on the Biz" kind of posting where you highlight trends and news in your industry or organization. Create a Notebook and then publish the link to your organization's blog or wiki. Definitely a good alternative strategy for blogging research and link posts.

Comments

[Claire Thompson]

Michele, your post is so timely for me! I'm preparing for a conference next week where I'll be co-presenting to distance educators on how to get the most out of Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Notebook. From your post I can see how teachers could use Google Notebooks to post links for specific units/projects/etc. Better yet, have students add to the notebook so the public page is constantly updated by the class. Thanks for the inspiration!

[Robin Reagler]

Thanks, Michele. This new (to me) tool looks like fun. I've set this up and installed the firefox extension. Not sure exactly what I'm going to use it for but I'm going to give it a try. Robin

[Michele Martin]

Hi Claire--great idea to have kids adding to the Notebook!

And Robin--I mostly use Notebook for researching on projects. I've also begun to use it to build training handouts, mostly because the process of adding resources is easier in some ways.