Note Taking - What is the Best Way?
World History

Note Taking - What is the Best Way?


While I have a lot of less traditional ways of teaching (in case you haven't figured it out from my blogs), I still do have the kids do some note taking.  Here I have struggled in asking whether or not even this part of my teaching is up with the times.  It was interesting this year when several of my AP students decided to do collective note taking using Google Docs.  At first I was hesitant fearing that the kids were not paying attention (since they could communicate through the notes), but I checked in and watched their faces a lot (to see if they were laughing when they should not have been and paying attention when they should have been) and it seemed to work fairly well.  But in talking to a fellow AP teacher as part of preparing for a summer institute I am doing tomorrow, we agreed that the way we learned is not necessarily the only way in that kids can take the traditional Cornell style notes, but also the type (which I like) where you split the page and add class notes to the ones you did while reading or even using web notes for the visual learner.  Here is a nice way of looking at those differences. 




- Personalized Urls
We normally start my classes with a five question quiz where my students can use their notes from their flipped video to answer the questions.  It serves a few purposes.  First I won't count the quiz grade if the notes aren't good enough...

- Changing The Face Of Instruction
I am a member of several Facebook teacher sites and am in the midst of adding to one where a teacher said his administration has banned front of the room teaching.  A number of the teachers are saying how awful that is.  Truth be known I have...

- Videonot.es For Flipped Video Notetaking
Normally I ask my students to split their screen, but this relatively (it came out last April) new app called Videonot.es that does that for you, putting the video on the left and the notes on the right.  It is then synced with Google Drive...

- Study Notes For Outlines
Mary Ward is going to be posting some ideas on my government blog and so from here I learned about Study Notes which has outlines for each chapter of world history. Obviously it is getting harder and harder for students to be assigned the traditional...

- Lingro To Translate, Define And Give Part Of Speech
So this year two great things have already happened.  1) I decided to improve my teaching by taking on a co-ESOL teacher and taking 10 very new to the US kids in addition to my load of 20.  Secondly my AP and I hired several very tech savvy...



World History








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