NoodleTools For Teachers: Viewing & Responding to Comments

This page explains how teachers can view and respond to student comments.

In your inbox, while you cannot make changes to the citations, notecards, or outline, you can add comments. Students will appreciate having a chance to improve or correct their work based on your feedback before they submit their final work.

You can leave feedback on your students’ project via your project inbox. Comments can be added to a project, sources, and notecards. To learn how students can add comments and questions, see the NoodleTools tutorial “How to write and respond to comments and questions.”

If your comment or question is about a specific source citation, navigate to Sources and enter your comment/question in the comment area below the source citation. 

You can also select "Compliment" if it is praise or "Action Required" if a student has to do something related to your comment. If you are grading the citations you can add a grade/score.

Click Send to add your comment to the project. If you want to save a copy of your comment for another project, click "Save to my comment bank" and Send. The comment will be added to your comment database. 

Click the 3 dots to the left of the search box to view and edit your saved comments.

The comments are categorized by Project, Sources, or Notecards.

To use a previously saved comment in a new comment, enter the first few characters of the comment and a menu will appear. On the menu, select the saved comment to use. 

All comments become part of the project and cannot be deleted.

1. Click Comments in the left navigation.
2. On the popout screen, click General Project Comments.
3. Enter your comment.

1. Click Sources in the top navigation.
2. To the right of a reference, under Options, select Add comment.
3. The Sources comments panel will open, displaying any previous comment thread for that reference.
4. Enter your comment, choose a comment classification and click Send.

Notecards associated with a source:  On the displayed notecard on the Sources screen, use the notecard's Options menu to select Add comment, and the Notecard comments panel for comments will open and you can add a comment for that notecard.

Click Notecards in the top navigation.

Tabletop view:

1. Hover on a notecard (or long-press on a tablet), click Add comment.
2. The Notecard comments panel will open, displaying any previous comment thread for that notecard.
3. Enter your comment, choose a comment classification and click Send.

Detail view:

1. Select the notecard in the left column by clicking the notecard title (it will highlight blue and the notecard’s contents will be displayed in the middle panel).
2. On the notecard detail, click Add comment in the lower right.
3. The Notecard comments panel will open, displaying any previous comment thread for that notecard.
4. Enter your comment, choose a comment classification and click Send.

Outline

At this time, comments can be added only to notecard items in the outline. Follow the above steps for adding a comment to a notecard.

When a student has left a comment, a red comment icon will appear on the Inbox tab.

To view the comment:

1. Open the project in your inbox.
2. Click the comment button with the red dot and number of unread comments (upper right). 
3. Click on the unread comments to view them.
4. Click Respond to contribute to the thread.

When you initially click the comment button, the comments panel will be displayed that reflects the screen you are viewing (e.g., notecards, if you are on the Notecards screen). To view comments in one of the other categories, click the corresponding category header in the comments panel.

To view the source or notecard that is being referenced in the comment, click View source, or if you are in the Notecards category, click View note card.

Identifying the author of the comment

Each comment identifies the author by their ID and displays the date and time it was written. See above screenshot. In a collaborative project, each team member can contribute separately to the thread.

The next time a student opens the project, the comment button displays the total number of unread comments, including your new comments.

Students respond to your feedback by clicking Respond below your comment. See the NoodleTools tutorial “How to write and respond to comments and questions.”

In a collaborative project, NoodleTools tracks the number of comments left by each collaborator and displays them on the Dashboard screen under Sharing and Collaboration in the Contribution column (the number displayed next to the talk-bubble icon):

Viewing comments between collaborators is the same as if you are viewing comments by a single student in any project. 

Click Respond to add a comment to the thread.