PowerNotes and OpenStax Partnership

PowerNotes is delighted to announce that we have partnered with OpenStax, a part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. As an educational initiative, it's their mission to improve educational access and learning for everyone. 

OpenStax’s mission is to transform education so it works for every student. As an OpenStax Ally, PowerNotes is joining OpenStax in that mission by helping to provide an intuitive digital aggregation tool for digital reading and writing alongside OpenStax text resources to enhance teaching and learning, at a low cost.

We built PowerNotes based on our experience and frustration with digital research and writing. Until now, tools have not been developed specifically for today’s research process and the transition into writing, leading to inefficiency and frustration for students and instructors, who must resort to using products built for other purposes. PowerNotes is designed to address the challenges inherent to source-based writing in the digital environment. We seek to improve writing quality with tools that provide an efficient and continuous workflow through the entire digital research and writing process.

We designed PowerNotes to unify the steps of reading, gathering, saving, annotating, organizing, outlining, tracking, and citing research into a single, efficient workflow that feeds directly into the writing process all while never leaving the source. (PowerNotes streamlines the process steps in the boxes below).

With PowerNotes, students are able to:

• annotate and engage with their content;
• automatically save citations in the format they designate, including APA, MLA, IEEE, American Medical Association 11e, Chicago, Bluebook Law, and more;
• save and annotate images, graphs, and headers;       
• evaluate their sources, which can be used as a powerful learning tool for developing information literacy;
• Analyze & synthesize their sources in one of our provided rubrics.

At any time, students can then organize and begin writing in the PowerNotes web app.  Students intuitively understand how to drag and drop digital note cards gathered during the research process.  At any point, students can share their project outline with faculty, TA, peers, the writing center, or a tutor for formative feedback or intervention.  PowerNotes can also be used collaboratively with colleagues and peers working on projects in groups.

We’re excited to be an OpenStax Ally, helping to improve educational outcomes for digital reading and writing without exorbitant expenses that most students can’t afford.

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