Digital Note Taking Strategies That Deepen Student Thinking

What is Sketchnoting? - Verbal To Visual Are you curious about what sketchnoting is and how you might use it? Here’s an overview for you, pulled from a resource kit that I built called Sketchnoting In The Classroom. Sketchnoting is a form of note-taking, hence the “noting” part of it, but as you might guess it involves bringing more visuals into the process compared to typical note-taking, hence the “sketch” part. The whole idea behind adding sketches to your notes is that it taps into parts of your brain that would lie dormant if you only use words to explore ideas. It’s the combination of the two that’s most powerful – using both words and visuals while taking notes. That’s what will fully light up your brain. Six Thinking Scaffolds That Can Move Students Toward Deeper Levels of Understanding Grotzer and a team (Nancy Oriol, Stephanie Kang, Colby Moore Reilly, and Julie Joyal) looked at the Harvard Medical School MEDscience curriculum, founded by Oriol, that uses technology-mediated, problem-based learning simulations to enrich the experience of high school biology students. Joyal — executive director for MEDscience — and the team noticed that as their problem-based curriculum progressed, students changed the way they approached problems. Rather than waiting for the teacher to give them answers, they made hypotheses based on existing knowledge, discussed their thoughts with their teams, and took risks — all signs of deeper-level learning. To study this shift in classroom behavior, Joyal, Moore Reilly, and Grotzer used a sample of 21 students from a range of public and private schools in the Boston. “We know that experts pay attention to a very different set of patterns than novices often do. Taking Students from Novice to Expert

What's the best, most effective way to take notes? If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive. Learning how to retain information The most effective note-taking skills involve active rather than passive learning. Active learning places the responsibility for learning on the learner.

Thinking about thinking helps kids learn. How can we teach critical thinking? Few people doubt the value of developing students’ thinking skills. A 2013 survey in the United States found 93% of employers believe a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important [the emphasis is in the original] than [their] undergraduate major. A focus on critical thinking is also common in education. In the Australian Curriculum, critical and creative thinking are known as “general capabilities”; the US has a similar focus through their “common core”.

Nik's QuickShout: Make PDF Texts into Interactive Online Activities for Blended Learning Pages Monday, 25 September 2017 Make PDF Texts into Interactive Online Activities for Blended Learning This tool enables teachers to build onto more traditional course book based courses and add a blended learning element. Once you have created an account you can upload PDF documents, or buy in text books from publishers or book stores and add them to courses. 74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare's Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep In the graduate department where I once taught freshmen and sophomores the rudiments of college English, it became common practice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on many an Intro to Lit syllabus, along with a viewing of Julie Taymor’s flamboyant film adaptation. The early work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy, cobbled together from popular Roman histories and Elizabethan revenge plays. And it is a truly bizarre play, swinging wildly in tone from classical tragedy, to satirical dark humor, to comic farce, and back to tragedy again.

12 Free Web Annotation Tools for Teachers to Draw, Add Notes, and Highlight Sections on A Web page 1- Diigo Diigo is the first web service that comes into mind when talking about web annotation. . Diigo has a tool that lets you annotate web pages, add notes and colour specific chunks of a paragraph to share with your colleagues. 2- Sharedcopy This is another great bookmarking and annotating web service. It allows users to save a web page and annotate it the way they want via adding comments in text boxes or highlighting important parts.

How to Lead Students to Engage in Higher Order Thinking I teach multigrade, theme-based courses like Spirituality in Literature and The Natural World in Literature to high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors. And like most English language arts teachers, I’ve taught courses built around the organizing principles of genre (Introduction to Drama), time period and geography (American Literature From 1950), and even assessment instrument (A.P. Literature). No matter what conceptual framework guides the course I’m teaching, though, I begin and anchor it with what I call a thinking inventory. Thinking Inventories and Essential Questions Essential questions—a staple of project-based learning—call on students’ higher order thinking and connect their lived experience with important texts and ideas.

5 Free Annotation and Collaboration Tools for Web Projects This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Specific, contextual feedback is crucial for teams collaborating online, which is why it's so important to make receiving it as fast, efficient and easy as possible. Asking for feedback can be tedious and is often done out of context, for example, via e-mail. However there are numerous tools available to make the task of gathering and giving feedback for web projects simpler and swifter. When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as “concentrate” or “don’t get caught up in things that aren’t relevant.” But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including “making connections,” “comparing” and “breaking things down.” Ritchhart studied 400 students at a school focusing on cultivating a culture of thinking. The study had no control group, but Ritchhart could chart development of metacognition from 4th-11th grades. “Students basically made a two-and-a-half year gain from what would be expected just from teachers trying to create that culture of thinking,” Ritchhart said. He admits that the study isn’t definitive, but to him it’s proof that when teachers focus on these ideas they do see improvement.

Take Note: How to Curate Learning Digitally Note taking lies at the heart of curricula around the world. Beginning in elementary school, we teach students to "take notes" so that they can maintain a record of the content disseminated to them by the teacher. And yet, with mobile devices replacing paper notebooks, this process has become increasingly complex as students (and teachers) struggle to apply previous strategies to new tools. In the past, I wrote about the 4Ss of Note Taking With Technology. Lesson Plan, Meal Plan, and Fitness Plan Templates Last week Canva announced a handful of new features including a video editor and a desktop application. A new education-specific version of Canva was also announced. Those new features don't appear to have been rolled-out quite yet.

Sketchnoting Resources Sketchnoting is not just an attractive way to take notes, it can improve retention and learning. These sketchnoting resources will get you started with your students. You don’t have to have a ton of talent, just a little know-how.