For the "Organizing Your Online Life" project, I presented information on Evernote, which I really enjoyed learning about and will probably continue to use. The other members of my group presented Diigo and Pinterest. I was most interested in how these tools can be used in the classroom by both students and teachers.
With Diigo, I was underwhelmed. At this point, I think that most browsers have an adequate bookmarking system of their own, especially to meet my needs. One cool feature, though, is the ability to highlight text on webpages, provided the webpages won't change or go away. That is a unique feature that I've never come across before. As a student, that could be beneficial when doing research for a project. I didn't really see any value for teachers, though. I suppose the ability for students to share bookmarks and comments with each other if they're working on a project together could be helpful.
Pinterest is something I was already quite familiar with but have not used myself. I'm not a big fan of it, as it doesn't really appeal to any of my tastes or interests. I would never use it directly or indirectly with students, as I don't think there are any appropriate features to be applied to them. I would, however, take advantage of the boards about teaching. It's really neat that there are boards out there with specific ideas on how to present different lessons in math, science, language arts, etc. When working with kids, I think it's important to mix things up and find new ways to keep them engaged in the learning process, and Pinterest could be a really good resource for ideas on how to do that.
Of the three tools I learned about, Evernote is the one that I felt had the most to offer in the classroom. I think it would be really cool for a teacher to set up an account that all of the students have access to in the classroom and at home. They could submit assignments on it for quicker turnaround, and teachers could post resources for further review. One idea that I thought was great was for a teacher to take pictures of the white board when a particularly important concept has been laid out and post it on Evernote for students to reference indefinitely. Teachers can also use Evernote personally to build and organize lesson plans, assignments, and projects.
All in all, learning about the different tools was pretty fun. Hearing some of the suggestions on how best to use them in the classroom got me thinking about the types of things I want to do and how I can leverage technology to enhance them.
"One idea that I thought was great was for a teacher to take pictures of the white board when a particularly important concept has been laid out and post it on Evernote for students to reference indefinitely."
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me like many of the technologies we use in the classrooom are designed to reduce student interaction with the material we present in one important way: note-taking. I think that there is a lot of value in old-fashioned note-taking (even with a keyboard, rather than a pencil, in hand), insofar as students learn to translate concepts into their own words.
Things like powerpoint and online dissemination of information make it easy for us to feel assured we have given everyone an education; however, have we really given the students a sense of their place in the coursework? Have we given them a reason to invest in our teaching, or disinvest?
You make an excellent point here. Whenever I have PowerPoint slides to rely on, I take notes quite differently. I'm not sure if I'd say I'm less engaged, but the act of writing (or typing) notes does help me for retention purposes. Even if I'm paying close attention to a lecture, I won't get as much out of it if I'm not taking my own notes.
DeleteOn that note, I do think it could be helpful to take pictures of the white board after working through a particularly difficult math problem, for example. I think the key would be to make sure the students don't know if/when something will be posted for viewing later on. That way, they would know they need to take their own notes all the time, and the teacher could post certain things at his/her discretion. Another thing that could help is posting things for a limited amount of time, say a couple days, before taking them down.
This reminds me of something we talked about earlier, I think in 511 - many teachers were lamenting that their students don't know how to read textbooks effectively, and thus were bending over backwards to find alternative ways to teach their students. While they may have been effectively teaching their subject, their kids were missing out on learning how to read informative texts.
DeleteI'm not sure where I weigh in on this in terms of note-taking, though. It's definitely important for students to be able to take unguided notes. However, math moves really quickly. The main reason I decided not to be a math major in college was that I couldn't keep up with notes, and thus learned absolutely nothing during the class periods - I was trying so hard to write things down as quickly as possible, to capture as much as I could in my notebook before the teacher started erasing the parts I still hadn't copied, that I couldn't listen to a word he said. Math class was an exercise in futility, and I probably would have learned more by skipping class and reading the textbook at my own pace.
In history, ELA, biology, etc, instructive lectures are given in more-or-less narrative form, and a student can take down abbreviated notes. But math is a different beast, and I think the students are better served with guided notes, or the knowledge that what they fail to capture in their class notes will be available to check or copy later. In my opinion, it's more important that they learn to understand spoken mathematics, than that they learn to copy things from the board letter-for-letter at lightning speed.
In case the point of my rant wasn't clear, I think Erin's idea of putting proofs up on EverNote or a class blog is an awesome idea!
DeleteI agree that of the three tools, Evernote is the most interesting and has the most potential. I was assigned Evernote to teach and I was really struck by how darn simple it is. It's really just a very basic way of organizing stuff. The power lies in the user's ability to choose the organizational scheme.
ReplyDeleteI do have one question about using Evernote with a class - I know that a premium account is needed to share notebooks, but once shared, can people without premium accounts edit those notebooks? Add or change notes? If so, I can see it being a powerful collaborative tool - teacher puts up a prompt of some sort, students are required to post responses or replies, both to the teacher and each other. But if all the students need a premium account to contribute, that's a little impractical! Clearly I need to do more investigating into the details. UPDATE: Some quick investigation didn't give me an easy answer to this one. Hmmm!
Practicalities aside, Michael makes a good point. We need to keep an eye on the line between making information easy to access and making it easy to not think about the information.