I've been thinking about
note taking a lot lately. While I was at
Stanford last week, I had a good conversation with a community college economics professor who was struggling with getting his entry level college students to take effective notes. I proposed an idea I have been tooling around with and hope to post the results after the first week of school.
The basic idea is this:- Create a lecture
- Record it
- Play it back to students using my digital projector
- Simultaneously use the overhead projector and some transparencies to model note taking including:
- Shorthand
- Cornell Format
- Identifying Main Ideas
- Picking out Key Words
- Creating deeper than surface level questions
- Summarizing
- Let students copy my initial notes
- Expect students to mimic this process by themselves in future attempts
If I can lay down the foundation for better note taking now, the results of their shared notes should (hopefully) be even better.
Posts
Great idea. I posted it on my site since our school blocks blogger: http://henricowarriors.org/hasley/?p=571.
ReplyDeleteGetting students to formulate questions that go beyond the surface level is a real challenge. I found one method of encouraging engagement in the process of generating questions (albeit not always good ones) is to use student questions on quizzes.
ReplyDeleteMaybe in the note-taking process, the students could each submit a question or two related to the material. At the end of a unit section, a study guide/quiz could be made of half student questions and half teacher questions.
If multiple classes are covering the same material, a competition could be effecetd wherein the class with the best submitted set of ten or fifteen questions is the class whose questions get used to create the quiz that all the classes will take...