UnisonEDU

Although many of us have begun to conduct learning as we did before the pandemic, this former post suggests the use of digital notebooks for use with students may still be beneficial. There are definite takeaways from the methods used over the last couple of years. Maybe this is one of those for you and your students. Former UnisonEdu member Biz Summers originally wrote this article in August of 2020. You can connect with her on Twitter at @BizzyITC.

As we attempt to prepare for a year of new challenges and rethinking our teaching-style, I’ve heard incredibly innovative ideas. I’ve heard teachers prioritizing accessibility and student voice like never before. And as I hear all these ideas, I think that teaching might never be the same again, even when it’s safe for us all to be back in the classroom. That is, with one exception: the interactive notebook. Reimagining the notebook--with its engaging activities and cloze notes--is a challenge for many. Although there is no perfect duplicate, I offer the following suggestions.

Microsoft’s OneNote Class Notebook provides the closest digital approximation to a traditional notebook, but it also presents the most hurdles. If you’re not in a Microsoft district, go on and skip to the next paragraph now. However, if you and your students have access to Office 365, this may be a great solution. Class Notebook provides each of your students with a digital Notebook that only you and they can access. With a few clicks, you can push content to each student, and they can type or draw or add images to the pages that you send them. I don’t know of another tool that so closely mimics the interactive notebook experience, but there are a few drawbacks. OneNote can be used on a phone or tablet, but it takes up a lot of space on the device--too much, if several teachers are using this. For this reason, OneNote is only ideal for a class in which each student has their own, unshared laptop.

A much more flexible solution is available in Google Slides. Teachers can create a notebook in which each slide is a notes template and use Google Classroom or their LMS to deliver those activities and templates to each student. There are so many creative ways to organize these Slides, and because this is a popular technique, great templates are only a short Google away. The Slides notebook limits you only in how far in advance you can plan. Unless you have all of your note templates planned for the year, you’ll have to push out notes over the course of many assignments, which means that instead of one cohesive notebook, students have multiple files to review.

A more traditional approach is to remember that our new normal is not our forever normal. Eventually, most of us and our students will return to a traditional classroom. To this end, students might be best served by keeping a traditional notebook with paper and pencil. Although this does make the “interactive” portion challenging, we know that students who are headed into higher education will need note-taking skills, and synchronous meeting time is an excellent opportunity to model that while delivering content. And in a distance learning situation, students can’t say, “I left my notebook at home!” 

If none of these solutions feels just right to you, I challenge you to consider the purpose of an interactive notebook. I believe our most common goals are that students will have a centralized place from which to study and that they will actively engage with the material we are teaching. If a traditional notebook is no longer an option, how else might we help our students meet these goals? For example, what if a teacher kept a blog covering the content for the year, and asked students to engage with that blog via comments or games or activities within their LMS? If we consider the “why” behind the notebook, what other creative solutions can we find that will help us continue to transform the way we teach?

Written by Unisonedu member Debbie Martin. You can connect with her on Twitter at @DebbieMartinITC. 

As teachers, we frequently plan for evidence of student learning. Popular options can include thumbs up/thumbs down,  3-2-1 exit tickets, short answer questions, and the inevitable quiz or test. I would like to challenge us all to consider methods of allowing for student creativity in order to show evidence of learning. This is a great way to incorporate the ISTE Student Standards - in particular standards for Knowledge Constructor and Creative Communicator. 

When students are challenged to be creative it allows them to engage and wrestle with information in multiple ways. For example, let’s consider the process used to create stop motion animation. This past school year we used stop motion animation in 6th-grade science during a unit on tides. During this unit, our students learned about tides, talked about tides, wrote about tides, figured out how to represent tides with props, and in addition, navigated working with partners and all of the soft skills that entails. Let’s explore what happened during this unit:

It is important for students to have a solid understanding of the topic in order to truly be able to create using this knowledge. This article, Why Content and knowledge are Important for Innovation by George Couros lays a great foundation for this. The science teacher in my school used multiple resources such as videos, text, and images to teach the content. Next, students were each assigned a partner to work with on the creation of their stop motion animation. 

Each pair of students had to plan using a storyboard before any animation photographs could be taken. The storyboard is an essential part of the process because it requires the students to document the movements of the earth and moon around the sun which results in tides. On the storyboard, students drew pictures to represent what they would photograph. They also wrote their script to use when narrating their animation. By drawing as well as writing, students are engaging more of their brains. In addition, the partners had to agree on what to say. As you can see, students are thinking about, talking about, and diagramming the topic they are learning. The storyboard also provided a natural checkpoint for the teacher to verify student understanding of the topic before the animation process began. 

The next step involves gathering and creating props and labels to use in the animation. Depending on the amount of time allocated to the unit, students can brainstorm and bring in or make their own props, or the teacher can provide props for students to use. Deciding on labels also requires students to understand the content and what should be emphasized, 

Once the above steps have been completed, students are ready to begin photographing their animation! Popular choices include Stop Motion Animator for Chrome OS or even WeVideo. Both are easy to use and have their own benefits. Stop Motion Animator saves directly to student Chromebooks and can be used offline. WeVideo is probably the better option if narration of the animation is part of the creation process. 

From my experience stop motion animation is enjoyed by almost all students. By having checkpoints along the way through the use of storyboarding students end up with final products that accurately document the process being shown. Because the student is not the focus of the animation they are less reluctant to create a video project. I encourage you to give student creation a try if you’ve been looking for a way to really engage your students with a topic and have them wrestle with it in multiple ways!