In preparation for the up-coming new academic year, I’ve been checking out the latest versions of tools in the Zoho Office suite. As a e-learning application, the notebook application seems particularly worth a longer look.
Essentially a container for web objects presented within a notebook idiom, Zoho Notebook makes it easy to combine text, graphics, (Internet hosted) video and audio, freehand graphical shapes, other web pages, RSS feeds(!) and and even embedded Zoho applications (spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc.) into interactive presentations. As an example of what can be done, this presentation "Should I Know Web 2.0" by Henry Thiele uses a Zoho Notebook to present the educational case for Web 2.0 technologies. There’s nothing here that you couldn’t, with some effort, do in PowerPoint (or with rather more effort in Blackboard!), but by being about the web and at the same time on the web, it seems somehow more compelling. It certainly convinced me that there’s something worth exploring further!
Plus, wouldn’t it make a great tool for creating e-portfolios?
