NoodleTools Notecards

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What are NoodleTools Notecards?

The notecards feature in NoodleTools is designed to help you extract, organize and synthesize information you find during the research process. NoodleTools’ notecards are “e-index cards” with some important advantages. You can:

Access your notes from any computer via a Web browser
Capture any digital information (e.g., quotes, images, diagrams, tables) from the Web
Link your notes to your sources to avoid accidental plagiarism
View your notes alongside your bibliography entries in order to assess the value of each resource
Create notes of your own ideas not linked to any source (“thought cards”)
Label notecards with word or phrase “tags” that represent concepts or facts you want to keep track of
Color key your notecards for quick identification
Search your notecards by keyword, tag, or source to view and organize notes in multiple ways
View, arrange and organize notecards on a virtual tabletop quickly and easily
Create an outline and move individual notecards or piles into topics or subtopics
Export both your notecards and outline to a word processor where they can be edited and printed
Share both the notecards and outline with your teacher

Accessing the Notecards feature in NoodleTools

Once you create and open a new bibliography list in NoodleTools, there are two ways to access the notecards feature: the Notecards and Bibliography screens. Since you can view and edit all of your notecards in either screen, you’ll find that you develop a preference for working in either the Notecards or Bibliography screen as you take notes.

Options available from either screen:

Create, edit, delete, and export/print notecards
Tag notecards with words or phrases that represent important facts or ideas
View notecard comments (or add/edit/delete notecard comments if you are an instructor viewing a shared list)

Clicking Bibliography in the navigation bar takes you to your list of citations. In the Notecards column next to each citation, you’ll find a New link that allows you to create a new notecard. If a citation is already associated with notes, you will see the number of notecards you created and a Show link to view the notecards below the citation.

Options available only from the Bibliography screen:

Quickly display the notecards for a particular source to help you assess the value of the source or to remind you if you have finished taking notes
Show or hide notecards depending on your needs, via the Notecard display links near the top of the screen. The “Show only notecards that have comments” option is the primary mechanism for a student to view new notecard comments from an instructor.
Full details of the notecards are always shown
All comments (notecard comments and citation comments) can be viewed (or added/edited/deleted) from this screen

When it comes time to organize and outline, click on Notecards in the navigation bar to see the Notecards screen.

Options available only from the Notecards screen:

Create, edit, and delete notecard piles
Organize notecards on a virtual tabletop via drag-and-drop
Organize a “pile” of notecards under a main idea
Order notecards within a notecard pile
Add or delete color tags and visual cues
Rename and delete word/phrase tags
Search notecards by keyword, tag, or source association
Export/print notecard piles, a group of selected notecards, or all notecards
Create an outline
Associate notecards with topics or subtopics in the outline via drag-and-drop
Export/print the outline alone, or with the contents of your notecards