Summarizing+and+Notetaking

=Read and Reflect=

How do you currently apply this strategy without the use of technology? In my classroom practice I really didn't have students do much summarizing. Maybe when they responded to literature they might summarize a story. Usually if students completed notetaking I would provide a form to fill in or dictate the notes. As a librarian students were directed to summarize or take notes in the context of research. Working with 6th grade language arts classes we took two different approaches to notetaking...one was using notecards and the other was a grid approach where students would label the grid with their questions and they would record notes as they found answers to their questions. I preferred the grid because it tied together the questioning we were expecting students to do as a good researcher and by recording information as they found answers to questions was a way to limit plagairism and promote good notetaking.

What new insight did you gain from the reading? A recurring theme for me is how as teachers it is important to make explicit what we want kids to know and do. I think at times as adults we have assumed that kids "know" what we want and some few students are able to produce what we want but most students need explicit instruction and modeling. I appreciate the details about how summarizing and notetaking actually help students cognitively and aren't busy work tasks. I also want more detailed strategies for teaching summarizing and notetaking. I like the idea of the using the editing track changes to aid and illustrate sumarizing. I don't think anyone is my school is utilizing students phones for classroom...in the near future with i-phones and droid it will become even more of a good idea because these devices are powerful technology and the kids bring them with them. I like the idea of videotaping kids but I think i would also want to teach them to imbed them so that it minimizes the management I have to do. I'd love some ideas to manage student video productions. The wiki is great for collaborative work and also for summarizing...I hadn't made that explicit connections.

=Apply and Reflect=

Provide evidence of the tool that you learned.

media type="custom" key="6284219"

How might you use this tool in your classroom?

This is a phenomenal tool...wow! I could see using it with an image of a current event and have the students comment to develop a summary or use it with a diagram and the students comment to summarize the elements of the diagram. Also you could require students to use the text feature for notetaking. I'd love to use this with book discussion. Possibly images to connect to a novel from a historical time period.