Hello, My name is HyunSoo Lim who is a developer in Springnote. Today, I want to share my story about visiting Hanne elementary school.

On April, I went to IlSan with my co-workers to visit Hanne elementary school where is famous for using Springnote and educates students in English as a model school. When the school was appointed to a model school at first, teachers in the school explored options to help students while discussing how to educate them in learning English and finally, chose Springnote as a tool. In 2008, Hanne elementary school started a program that involved in nine hundred students writing diaries and wordplays in English. The way this system works is that once students write diaries in English teachers correct their grammar and leave comments on Springnote. At the end of 2008, after successfully practicing the English teaching program the school published a book called ‘English Diary in wiki.’ based on the content on Springnote. I got a copy of the book (^__^) as shown below.

At the beginning of 2009, teachers in Hanne Elementary School asked the Springnote team to use Springnote better for interacting with students. In the past, nine hundred students and their teachers used one personal notebook. So, the teacher who owned the notebook had a hard time to approve students' requests and in some cases, students tried to write on a page simultaneously so they had to see the notice "The page is locked" or NICKNAME is writing. Please wait." This was an issue.

So, our team decided to have a one-day workshop for the existing teachers and newly appointed teachers about how to use Springnote from beginning to advance. About 30 teachers came to the workshop. There were two groups: teachers who are already familiar with Springnote and teachers who don’t know Springnote. So, we explained the basic features and moved to advanced functions including page permission and managing notebooks.

At the workshop, we suggested the teachers a new guideline called “How to create a collaborative notebook in a class” This new guideline eliminates a burden for teachers to approve students’ requests and solves the page locking issue when students try to edit a page at the same time. The following notebooks are in action.

• 3rd grade
• 4th grade
• 5th grade
• 6th grade

Unfortunately, we couldn't have a time to talk about Springnote in general with students because they already left school by the time when we finished the workshop. But, I am very glad to see teachers who are not familiar with computers use Springnote and their environment. (I am telling you that the computer environment was not the best, IE 6 on CRT monitors T__T)  By helping teachers, now I know and understand how beginners look for features and use them and where they make mistakes. I truly felt that as a developer I have to consider more about less equipped computer/network environment and have a lot of work to do making Springnote  better for beginners.

Springnote 1.5.1 for iPhone and iPod touch has been released!! 

We are thrilled to relase this major upgrade from Springnote 1.3.  With this update you can download recent pages to local for reading them when you are offline and see the last page you read when re-opening the app which means that Springnote is operating smarter than ever. In addition, we improved our icon system for indicating current-page status so that by just looking at icons you will know your page status immediately. 

Springnote 1.5.1 is free and can be downloaded through App store.

We pride ourselves in making Springnote the best combo of note taking and wikis. With the release of Springnote for iPhone, note taking with Springnote has just been made better.

When you talk about note taking, it's often done in a notebook. Springnote so far has been a browser-based application, not leaving much room for many of the portable devices.

Now comes Springnote for iPhone. It's as simple as this: "take notes in iPhone/iPod touch and access it on Springnote" and "read all your Springnote pages on iPhone".

Below is the list of iSpringnote features, that will completely transform your iPhone experience:

1. Access your Springnote account from anywhere with your iPhone or iPod touch
2. Support Markdown syntax to maintain formatting through a PC and/or iPhone
3. Create new pages while on the go
4. Read existing pages on your iPhone
5. Attach mobile photos from your iPhone to a Springnote page
6. View page file attachments
7. View pages in its original hierarchical structure through a tree-style menu
8. View recent updates and view pages in the order they were updated
9. Read pages viewed by the iPhone offline by having page information stored to your iPhone’s local memory (page caching).
10. Smart searching allows you to search for pages easily through keywords
11. View pages in portrait or landscape mode by rotating your iPhone 90 degrees

Springnote for iPhone is free and can be downloaded through App Store. Download Springnote and simply change your iPhone life :)

Screenshots:

Few days ago, we came across this cool article and decided to respond with few words on the importance of technology to learning and education.

Springnote has already witnessed many benefits that it has offred to many educational organizations and success as well. Here's the comment we left on the article. Of course, we're getting ready to write more on the power of wikis in education and go even deeper into the Hannae Elementary School case explained later in this blog!

Till then, have a great weekend, everyone!

Hi, Sara!
Thanks for the great post. I really enjoyed it. Gave a whole new scope of the Tech-learning area.

Just to add few cents to what you were saying, I work for a wiki service named Springnote (http://springnote.com/en). It's being used by many academic institutions in Korea, from elementary schools all the way up to graduate level research institutions, and it's truly creating a new form of academic collaboration in a postive way, which never existed before.

For example, at this one elementary school, every student is required to use Springnote for all their academic activities. What happens is they actually do all their homework within the wiki. Lots of assignments are group projects; but after school, students can't really get together because they all go home. So in the evening, they get together online, communicating through IM and finishing their homework in Springnote. That night, teachers grade assignments and leave comments in Springnote. The conversation about the assignments gets carried over to the next day when they actually get "physically" together in classrooms and talk throughout the day. And the same cycle repeats.

While much of this process includes a new form of "virtual" collaboration, I think it's just better suited for the growing digital generation, that are increasingly spending more time online and are just simply getting more accustomed to processing their thoughts that way. Of course, a wiki like Springnote can be useful across all learning settings, be it college or even corporate.

I've shared my thoughts more in the following:

http://blog.springnote.com/pages/1718876

http://blog.springnote.com/pages/1635676

and this is the actual wiki page of the elementary school example I mentioned above. (Sorry its content is in Korean but many students learn to write their journals/diaries in English)

http://han1.springnote.com

Springnote is based in Korea. It has multi-language offerings in Korean, English, and Japanese. (We're planning to expand the language set in the near future!)

A question that naturally follows is this: "Why Asia? Do you think you can ever invade the invincible U.S. market while based in Korea? Stop dreaming!" Well, let me walk you through one step at a time to show what's really going on.

(click here for a larger view of the chart)

As a starter, needs for wikis are soaring higher than ever. If you study the search trend on Google, as shown in the charge above, there are far more queries for the word "wiki" than "blog ", i.e. Internet users are willing to learn more about wikis than blogs.

However, what's even more surprising is that most of those queries are indeed coming from many Asian and pan-Pacifc countries, such as Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. That means 1) we've got an astonishingly fast growing market in wikis, and 2) the market belongs to Asia. That seems to be a great business opportunity right there, doesn't it?

For example, Springnote, the sole online wiki service in Asia, gathers many users from around the world through its English and Japanese service offerings. A great number of them indeed come from China, Singapore, Japan, and Australia, in addition to many from the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada (We spotted an Swedish team today!) Openmaru, the maker behind Springnote, is located in Seoul, Korea, garnering a huge opportunity to explore the market here just by being local, i.e. Asian. While it's a service aiming for global presence, it's been so lucky to enjoy a success in Asia that could not easily come with many companies from the West .

The Web 2.0 revolution didn't stop in the Silicon Valley. It's spreading throughout the entire globe. Do you want to be global or local? It's a very important question any business development people should be asking themselves every single day. After all, the Internet increasingly blurring the boundaries bewteen countries, or even continents. :)

(I covered this topic on my personal blog TechnoKimchi more in depth.)