ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

With information coming at us at a frantic pace it is no wonder that we can quickly become overwhelmed. This is especially true for students who have a need to curate their notes and sources when writing research articles. Life was a lot easier for me when I was in school, there were simply books and journals, that I used to cite my works. Today students are faced with the myriad of Internet sources, books, journals, podcasts, and multimedia to keep account of when doing research. In this light, Matchware, recently released a new product NoteControl aimed at students to help them collect, collate, and sort notes when doing a written research paper. The coup de grace is the ability of NoteControl to output a perfectly formatted bibliography in many accepted and recognized formats (ie APA, MLA, Harvard to name a few.).

The premise of the program is quite simple-you create a notebook and then use the space to capture all of your notes which can include: Text, Picture, Sound, and Web notes. NoteControl allows the user to create a Folder structure to organize your notes and it is easy to move Notes that you capture from one folder to the next. For example, if you want to create a citation for text from a web site, you can simply go to the web site and highlight the text you want to use and then Click on the Text Note icon. This will bring up a note card with the text automatically included- you can change the name of the note card and once you click the Accept button your noted will be stored along with the source.You can use the same technique to capture graphics from websites or store needed  files (Word, PDF's) for your research project. If your computer has a microphone it is easy to store audio notes in your notebooks from within NoteControl.

Matchware has teamed up with WorldCat to enable users of NoteControl to access their large database of resources and collections from libraries around the world. Students are able within NoteControl to search the WorldCat database and have the citation automatically filled out with all of the necessary information for a properly formatted entry. If you have all of the information for a citation you can also manually add a citation to your research Notebook. Students will find the WorldCat tool a very handy tool to use for doing research and will find it even easier when it is time to generate the bibliography.

After you have collected your notes and resources NoteControl really shines when it is time to export all of your notes and create your bibliography. With one click of the mouse NoteControl lets you export your source listing, notes and bibliography directly to Word. NoteControl will export your notes and bibliography to any one of several formats including APA, Chicago, and MLA styles. The bibliography is perfectly formatted saving you the time an effort to manually recreate it once your paper is completed. You will find NoteControl an easy to use tool that is ideal for high school and college students who are writing research papers. As students begin to utilize more and more Internet resources they will find NoteControl and ideal tool to take charge and organize their resources for use in their papers. For those students who have access to MindView 4 and want to see their notes and resources in a mind map you can export them directly from NoteControl. Overall, NoteControl is an easy to use program that delivers on its promise to provide students a way to organize, sort and curate notes for research papers and projects. A one year subscription to NoteControl is prices at $49 dollars and at this time is only available for computers running Windows OS. There is a trial version of NoteControl available for student to try out which I would highly suggest. At $49 dollars for a year, NoteControl is good value and another tool that you should have your students take a look at to help tame the paper tiger when it comes time to write that research paper. It would be great if Matchware could add Text to Speech (TTS) supports within NoteControl for students that benefit from this type of support. NoteControl also allows students to work on collaborative projects across the web which adds value to this fine product. Give it a try and let me know what you think.