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It's not about what grade you teach, which class you teach, where you teach, or even if you teach (administrators and staff support play an important role in student learning as well.) It's all about all of us working together to help all students learn more.

Showing posts with label Note Taking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Note Taking. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Two (or five) heads are better than one...

Two (or five) heads are better than one…..
A picture paints a thousand words….

Both of these phrases support today’s post.

I’ve been blessed to work with some wonderful teachers at my school. My fellow World History teachers (Jamie Carlson, Deb Kenton, Tammy Morley, &  Matt Lewis) and I share lesson activities with each other as well as work together creating many of our assignments.
In my last post, I shared research supporting non-linguistic representations (pictures) in the high school classroom. In addition to formative assessment, pictures can be used to help students process new information.

In our World History World War I Unit, we modified the Etch-A-Sketch concept from Tools for Promoting Active In-Depth Learning to create a graphic organizer to accompany a PowerPoint we created. However, we went from pictures to words this time instead of taking written notes and then drawing pictures.

Our Lesson: Teacher presents their own material to cover the big ideas and details of how WWI was a “new kind” of war. Students will sketch as they view the material, and then will discuss the big ideas and details. Afterwards they will put the class interpretation into words and phrases.

Here’s the note organizer.



We got some great drawings of soldiers in the trenches with flamethrowers and of tanks and other new technology in the war.


Your turn:
How have you used pictures or visuals in your classroom?
Leave a comment to start our discussion.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Free Resource!

Free Resource!!!
(The couponer in me loves free.)

Easy note organizer that works in any class in any grade!

Having students take notes from a PowerPoint, textbook, presentation, etc????



Create a stapleless book for students to record their notes. The premade note sheet takes you just minutes to create and really helps students organize their notes.

This resource can be found for FREE at
http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/stapleless-book-30010.html

Online generator guides you in creating and even folding (that’s where I really needed help!) the booklet.

Examples of how I have used it in my class:

* As a test review activity
*As a note organizer as new material is presented

You could even have students create their own books as an assignment.

Check out the pictures of my students using them!



Took a whole 10 minutes to create!

The ReadWriteThink website is one of many free teacher sites that I discovered through the Thinkfinity website. More on that great resource in later posts. Stay tuned!