I thought I would try to tackle online note taking first.
We have a subscription to Noodletools and they have an excellent online note taking tool. I have tried to encourage teachers to use it with their students to little effect. Not sure why but I think that perhaps it's just another thing and they can't cope with something else. Then again there could be some innate problem with the set up of the note cards so I decided to take a closer look.
And here it is:
The top section of the note cards, allows the user to name or give a title to the card. The source is automatically added by Noodletools and the user can add the URL so that the source can be easily located again (if the source is from the Internet). There is also the facility for tagging.
There are two boxes for text. In the left hand box, entitled Direct Quote, the user can copy and paste the text that they want to use. Various editing tools allow the user to change the text. For example, you could highlight all the important points in the passage in one colour. In another, you could highlight words you were unsure of so that you could check them in an online dictionary at a later date.
The box on the right is for the user to paraphrase the direct quote. As I often say to students, this is one way to ensure that they are accused of plagiarising someone else's words. Of course that doesn't mean that they don't have to cite it as well!
The final box is for the user to add any notes. For example, you could add questions thrown up by the passage you have just summarised, or you might list information you still needed to find on the subject you are researching.
I think that it's a good tool for teaching students the skill of paraphrasing or summarising but as I said, it hasn't caught on at our school yet! I wonder if there is just too much work to do in this note taking tool. This is what students should be doing but as we know, people like to take the easiest route.
Tonight as an experiment I'm going to see if I can come up with a template on google docs which might do the same thing.
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