The sticky notes in Windows, Linux and Macs are rather useful for organizing my daily work when I’m at these machines. But sometimes I want the same type of sticky notes at hand regardless of the machine I’m on. When inspiration wells up, I need to capture it there and then! So I need a web based solution.
I use kl1p.com for immediately transferring information, long urls, and small documents and images between my different computers and students. It is quick and easy in that it doesn’t need a login, though you can password protect it if you want. No account is set up, you just create a url you want and away you go. However, that is just inputting to a web page and doesn’t have the nice aesthetics and ability to group and ungroup like sticky notes do. There are lots of options for sticky notes but I’ll write about two sticky note websites that are free for their basic uses and pretty good.
The first is the fully featured Lino at linoit.com. You can create sticky notes and attach files and images. You can also post urls of videos on the web. You can create multiple canvases, for example for home, work, holidays and special projects. It provides canvases that are for use with groups and you can decide who is a member with permissions to post on it. Even within the canvases the individual notes can be made private. If you are showing a canvas to your students, you can get them to focus on the correct sticky note as the content can be revealed by placing your cursor over it – and the content disappears (but not the sticky note itself) when the cursor is no longer hovering over it. Another use it would be great for collaborating with students posting pictures and comments, for example, after a holiday. You can also send emails to it which will create a sticky note. Another useful function is it can act as a diary to remind you of events. It is truly cross platform as it has an app for iPads and Android devices.
If you were going to make heavy use of it for a class, you would want to pay for the premium package. For example, you will be able to use up more than 50 MB of bandwidth and download more than 10 attachments per month.
If all the bells and whistles of Lino get in your way, then the other sticky notes website I have found useful, MyAgilityBoard, could be for you. It provides a basic sticky note interface with a variety of background choices. You can have it divided by lines and headers for more obvious organization of the notes – but they aren’t separate columns as such, which is fine. One feature that is perhaps unique to MyAgilityBoard is the ability to select dyslexic fonts.
MyAgilityBoard
There is a public view where people can see what is there but cannot add to it. By default all the notes are set as private. If you want to show your sticky notes, you just have to click on the lock on the note. You can upgrade if you want multiple boards and to be able to password protect your public board.
While it displays well on my iPad 3, it doesn’t bring up the virtual keyboard consistently nor can I copy from it – so sharing links with students wouldn’t work with this.
