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AppleOnline Tools and Apps

Freeform: Apple’s New Collaborative Brainstorming App

by Peggy Reimers
written by Peggy Reimers

Surprise! After a recent iOS 16 update, a new app just appeared on my screen. The design looked enticing, so curiosity got the best of me, and I opened up Freeform.

Screenshot by author

What Is Freeform?

According to Apple:

Freeform helps users organize and visually lay out content on a flexible canvas, giving them the ability to see, share, and collaborate all in one place without worrying about layouts or page sizes. Users can add a wide range of files and preview them inline without ever leaving the board. Designed for collaboration, Freeform makes it easier than ever to invite others to work on a board together. Users can even collaborate with others while on a FaceTime call. Freeform boards are stored in iCloud, so users can stay in sync across devices.

When I first opened it, it reminded me of a mashup of Google Keep, Jamboard, and an app I first used a long time ago when I I got my first iPhone called Popplet. I had to search to see if that one is still in existence, and it is, along with the free version, Popplet Jr. 

How to Use Freeform

Animals, transportation and education images in Freeform.
A Sampling of the Freeform Shapes – Screenshot by author

When you open the Freeform app, you can add a board by tapping the notepad and pencil icon in the top right corner. Everything you add to a board is either a single or double tap. This app is very user-friendly and the interaction I found with the tools is simple and straightforward. Once you select an item (symbol, text box, sticky note, etc.), a tool menu pops up giving you several options related to the tool. 

Freeform toolbar
Screenshot by author

You can easily share with other folks by hitting the share button. Immediately, I wondered how many people you could share a board with, and Apple promises “up to 100 collaborators in the same board.” I had no way to test this out, so I’ll just take Apple’s word for it. 

Freeform Basic Features

Freeform features
Screenshot by author
  • Available for iPhone and iPad
  • Add photos, video, and/or audio
  • Easily add sticky notes in seven color options 
  • Multiple options for text (font, alignment, and size)
  • Delete anything easily
  • Many options of brush styles and colors
  • 700 shapes divided into 16 categories 
  • Deleted boards can be recovered for 30 days

My Favorite Things About Freeform

Deleting items is easy peasy lemon squeezy. Just select the item and a toolbox automatically pops up at the bottom of the screen.  The red trashcan sticks out among the other black colored icon options. 

The scanning feature is really nice. Tap on the photo icon and choose scan. Position the document in view and it will automatically snap a picture. The technology auto-resizes to just grab your document. Then, you save it and enlarge it on your board. A final bonus is easily making annotations to your scanned document with the brush tool. 

Choose to display your boards in either icon or list view. You can display your boards by date or name. And once you create a bunch of boards, you can mark them as a favorite so you can find them quickly

The search feature is awesome. I put a random word and then a random phone number on two different boards. Once I typed the word or number into the search box, the board containing the information immediately popped up. 

Check out this post for more information on the Freeform app. If your school environment is Apple-centric, I could certainly see teachers and students benefitting from using the Freeform app. 

Uses for Freeform in Education

  • Sketchnoting
  • Group work
  • Brainstorming
  • Question Bank
  • Mindmapping
  • Note taking
  • Teacher lesson planning
  • Journaling
  • And more!

Have any ideas for how you’ll use Freeform? Be sure and leave a comment to let me know what your plans are and what you think of this app.

Featured image by Apple

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lunanotes
ChromebooksEducational ResearchGood Teaching

Digital Notes: Three Steps for Video Annotation

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Need a quick way to annotate YouTube videos? Then look no further than LunaNotes, a new Chrome extension now available. Come along with me as we take a quick look at this YouTube video note composer.

First, though, let’s take a look at why it’s important to add notes to video. It can have a powerful impact on student learning.

lunanotes

View or Get a Copy of the Google Slides version

Notetaking Makes a Difference

You may be familiar with a Surface Learning, evidence-based instructional strategy. This strategy is notetaking and enjoys an effect size of 0.51. Learning how to take notes yields the following benefits:

  • Increased engagement
  • More generative learning
  • Greater self-efficacy

To take full advantage of notetaking, students have to learn the skills involved in taking good notes. This means that note-takers engage in an active process to work through material. Also important is making connections or relating it to their existing knowledge (source).

An Active Process

You may ask, “What does an active process of notetaking entail?” It is not transcribing verbatim. In other words, just having students copy notes that the teacher created is not effective. Instead, students must paraphrase and summarize what they are learning, whether it is from the teacher, a resources like a textbook or website, or each other. These processes stimulate “deeper semantic processing,” and result in generative notetaking.

Generative notetaking pertains to “summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping.” Nongenerative notetaking involves copying something verbatim (source).

As students take notes, it’s important that they put what they see and hear in their own words. That is, paraphrase and summarize concepts. This means a three-step approach may be useful when considering digital notetaking.

Digital Notetaking: A Three-Step Process

When employing digital notetaking tools, you want to discourage verbatim transcription of information. Instead, encourage students to do the following:

Step 1: Take notes with paper and pencil.

The benefit of watching a video on the computer and taking notes by hand can stimulate learning as the deeper semantic processing gets the long-term retention results.

Step 2: Type up notes using LunaNotes.

Once you have jotted notes down on paper, review them. Type them up in LunaNotes as you watch the video a second time. Again, the goal is to revisit your notes over time to take advantage of spaced vs massed practice effect.

Step 3: Create a quiz on what you viewed.

Take advantage of the practice testing (a.k.a. retrieval practice) strategy. Create a quiz using one of the many tools available, such as Blooket, Vimboard, Podsie, or Knowt. For example, with Knowt, you can copy-and-paste your LunaNotes into it. Knowt will then create a quiz for you or your students.

Ready to see what LunaNotes can do?

Introducing LunaNotes

With a Chrome or Chromium browser (works fine in Microsoft Edge), get the browser extension. Other compatible browsers include Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi.

You can learn more about LunaNotes online at their website. They offer a short minute and a half video you can watch.

Features make it easy to do the following:

  • Add annotations to any YouTube video
  • Add colors, lists, bold, and other styles
  • Take screenshots of the video and draw on it

Your notes get saved to the cloud, so no need to worry if they disappear.

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thought cartography
ChromebooksEducational ResearchGoogle Tips and Tricks

Five Google-ly Mapping Tools for Thought Cartography

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Sometimes, you may need to create a semantic map or diagram, but don’t don’t really like some of the tools available in Google. But don’t worry; there are some fantastic tools you can take advantage of. What’s more, most of these tools will save diagrams straight to Google Drive. Let’s take a moment to review why working with diagrams is important, aside from their utility.

More Than Utility Tools: The Research

Concept maps, diagrams, mindmaps, and semantic webs: these words evoke complex creations, calling to mind the spider webs. The right tools at hand mimic paper and pencil, tapping into our generative powers. When you grasp a writing tool, you seize the chaotic energy of your mind. You seek to reflect the constellations of thought and map them. There are benefits to this thought cartography.

thought cartography

In the online compendium of research on evidence-based instructional strategies, those benefits are clear because all of these strategies have a thought mapping component which requires students to create a thought map or take notes. Below is an edited description of each of these strategies from the Visible Learning MetaX database. 

Phase of Learning: Surface Learning

  • Vocabulary Programs (d=0.63). This includes programs to build vocabulary, including subject matter vocabulary. It also includes making semantic maps to find connections to other words. This last item, making word connections via concept sorts and the Frayer Model, is most relevant.
  • Note-Taking (d=0.51). This involves students making notes in a systematic manner. Note-taking increases engagement, generative learning, and greater self-efficacy.

Phase of Learning: Deep Learning

  • Outlining and Summarizing (d=0.66). Involves identifying the main ideas and rendering them in one’s own words. The core skill is being able to differentiate between main and supporting ideas.
  • Concept Mapping (d=0.64). The creation of graphic, hierarchical representations of course content. When students arrange new information, connecting it to what they know, they learn best.

These strategies focus on drawing pictures to capture the firefly ephemerae of thought. What’s next?

Pinpoints of Light

The mind, a darkness sparkling with pinpoints of thought, merits exploration. The key concept is students engaging in metacognition. As I create a concept map, an outline, or take notes, I am full of questions that may include:

  • Should I build my understanding around this main idea?
  • Is this the main idea? What are the supporting or related concepts?
  • How do main idea and the supporting ideas connect to what I already know?
  • How can I best represent or arrange ideas to reflect what I know and what I am learning?

This self-interrogation is ever-present in all the strategies that involve diagramming and concept mapping. It is present in other strategies to integrate with prior knowledge (d=0.93), self-regulation (d=0.53), and others.

You may also find that self-verbalization/self questioning (d=0.59) often involves diagrams:

Talking to oneself about a difficult intellectual tasks, asking questions about what one encounters.

You may find yourself looking for tools that make thought mapping easier. As you try these out, keep in mind these guiding questions.

Guiding Questions for Thought Cartographers

Here are three questions you will want to keep in mind as you dig into these digital tools:

  • Does the tool make it easy to build hierarchical organizations of diagrams and ideas?
  • How easy does the tool make it to access and edit or revise content?
  • Can learners capture self-talk and questions about the intellectual tasks they work on in the tool?

Of course, you may also want to ask yourself, “Does this tool cost money and how might I deploy it in the classroom?”

Digital Thought Cartography Tools

The quick list of tools available to educators and learners include the following:

  1. Google Drawings: This is a core component of Google Workspace. Learners can combine hierarchical maps and outlines in one document. Although it may mean more work, you can do quite a bit within the limits of Drawings. An added benefit? Use it with Google Classroom. Start drawing online at drawings.google.com.
  2. Diagrams.net: Saves to Google Workspace. This is one of my favorite, free tools for creating concept maps, as well as diagrams. Get started with Diagrams.net via app.diagrams.net.
  3. yED Live: This easy-to-use diagramming and mapping tool is available as free, open source. You can run a program on your Windows computer or access it via a web browser. It is incredibly versatile and saves to Google Drive. yEd Live makes it a simple matter to share your creations with others. 
  4. Cmap Cloud: This venerable desktop mapping tool has made the jump to the cloud in this version. Like yED Live, it offers simple functionality as a cross-platform and browser-based tool. Unfortunately, it lacks saving to Google Drive and student account creation. Educators may still want to try out this tool for academics. Watch some videos to get started.
  5. Visual Paradigm Online: With no limits on use, this free tool has a lot to offer educators. Like the others on this list, Google Drive integration is built in, as is collaboration. You can make quite a bit before you run into the “Upgrade Required” message for some diagrams. This isn’t dis-similar to some infographic tools, offering a rudimentary creative space.
  6. Creately Diagrams: Similar to Lucidchart, you will need to pay for this diagram tool. It has a lot to offer, of course, at a cost. You can start for free to make fantastic concept maps, hierarchies of ideas, and more. It also features thousands of templates and shapes you can use for inspiration.

Need a bonus tool to explore and have money to burn? Check out Lucidchart Diagrams.  Like Diagrams.net, you can create flow charts, mind maps, and more. Unlike other solutions on this list, you will need to pay for it at some point (prices vary).

thought cartography

Created in Cmap Cloud

Common Features

Common to each tool is the ability to export diagrams and concept maps to PDF, PNG, and JPG formats. You will find that creating diagrams is quite easy. Here are a few more features you may want to keep an eye out for:

  • The ability to insert shapes and images
  • An ample template library of diagrams, maps, flowcharts
  • The ability to align or reshape shapes
  • Easy modification of shapes based on inserted text

As you explore the different tools, keep in mind the guiding questions. How can each of these tools support student learning and metacognitive self-talk?

Infographic

Here’s a quick infographic you can share with others. Have fun. Be sure to let me know if you decide to share online. Add these tags #TCEA @mGuhlin

Get the PDF version for printing

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notes
Educational Trends

Notes Tools for Educators

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Meetings, meetings, meetings. Everywhere I go online, there’s a meeting I need to take notes at. But one of the tough things about note taking in the digital world is that you don’t want to spend precious minutes flipping through paper notebooks. A quick search, find what you need, then keep typing. In this blog entry, let’s explore some simple, digital notes tools that you may not be familiar with.

Traditional Note-Management Tools

A look over the field will reveal a bucket load of tools. Before adopting any of them, I ask myself a few questions. In my time, I’ve worked with several before walking away in disgust. After a few years, new solutions have emerged that are worth taking a close look at. Here are some of the popular ones. I’ve left unlinked ones I do not recommend you check out.

There are many to choose from and each has its own unique feature set. Allow me to share some of my favorites with you and make a final recommendation.

For example, Google Keep adds OCR capability for pictures, allowing you to grab text from images. SimpleNote shines with its simplicity and web and app ubiquity. Notion provides a rich feature-set, reminiscent of Evernote. Zoho Notebook is beautiful, easy to use, and free.

All offer great  features and work on your smartphone. For example, Notion offers the ability to export notes as markdown, HTML, or PDF. This means you aren’t locked into the company’s business model should it fail. Making a quick exit can be important. Let’s take a closer look.

Is End-to-End Encryption Supported?

If you haven’t asked this question, you should. When dealing with sensitive, confidential data, encrypt it. Third-party tools should offer encryption. Avoid putting your sensitive data in any third-party, hosted solution without safeguarding it first. You can rely on a text encryption tool. Be sure to watch the encryption overview video that appears in this blog post below.

Wait, What Were You Saying About Encryption?

Worried about keeping data away from prying eyes? It’s easy to get comfortable with a note tool, so much so you put confidential information into it. But you should remember to only put non-sensitive information into cloud-based note tools. If you must put sensitive data in them, use encryption. Here is a short list of encryption tools you can use:

  • Folders or files with 7zip with AES-256. This is a simple compression program.
  • Files with FileLock.
  • Contents of notes or emails. Try a browser-based, text encryption tool. Here is one I like (but this one works, too).

Watch this short video to see how each works. It’s easier than you think.

Zoho Notebook: Note the quick note creation, image capture with annotation/draw, and to-do list.
This is the web browser view. There’s also the cross-platform app you can use on your smartphone.

Tool #1: Zoho Notebook

With its beautiful design, multimedia file support, and a great price point (free), I’m tempted to urge you to go set up an account right now with Zoho Notebook. The tool includes a wealth of endearing features that make you wonder, “Did I choose the right cloud-based Office suite?” Notebook boasts a robust GUI editor with about every tool you could want, such as:

note tools

  • Font styles (e.g. bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and highlighting/background color)
  • Alignment
  • Indent
  • Ordered and unordered lists
  • Checkboxes
  • Links
  • Image insertion
  • Horizontal rule
  • Tables
  • Quotes
  • Insert code

In addition to those wonderful features, you get spell check, reminders, and the ability to change the color of the background. What’s more, it allows for private/public sharing of a note, note-merging, versioning, copy/move, and locking of the note.  When locking a note, you simply enter a passcode to access it. You can attach files, draw, and make to-do lists on the fly. Did I mention Zoho Notebooks is free?

The mobile app for Zoho Notebook is also well-designed, making it easy to add private or public shares, make edits, and more. Here’s a quick visual walkthrough of Zoho Notebook:

Encryption Recommendation: Encrypt the file with file encryption tools.

Too fancy for you? Let’s try a different solution.

In StackEdit, you can organize your notes into folders. All is autosaved via a background synchronization process to your cloud storage of preference (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, Github).

Tool #2: StackEdit

StackEdit is one of my favorite markdown editors and note tools. Besides being free, StackEdit can sync anything you type to Google Drive or Dropbox. This makes it an ideal note-taking solution. What’s more, it works in the browser or as an app on Windows. Isn’t that amazing?

note tools

StackEdit is more than a simple note-taking tool. You can use it to write blog posts and format that content in HTML or Markdown. You can import HTML or Markdown-formatted files into StackEdit. One of my workflows involves typing something in StackEdit, then exporting the content as HTML to drop into a WordPress blog.

StackEdit can publish notes as blog posts to Blogger, WordPress, and Zendesk. You can choose whether to upload in Markdown format or HTML.

If you’re not familiar with Markdown editors, they are easy to use. The special codes (pound symbols, dashes) make formatting typed text a breeze. The only problem with StackEdit? There’s no mobile app for it.

Here’s a quick video overview:

Encryption Recommendation: Encrypt your content before you sync it by using a text encryption tool.

Tool #3: Web-Based

Want something more focused and simple to use? It’s hard to beat StackEdit but you may not need all its functionality. Or, perhaps it’s not complex enough and you need more features. Depending on whether you need simple or complex, SimpleNote or Notion are worth exploring. Both are no-cost for educators and students.,

note tools

Image Source: SimpleNote

SimpleNote (above) takes a minimalist approach to note taking compared to Notion. Too bad that SimpleNote does not provide multimedia file or Markdown format support. You are stuck with a simple text editor (but some people like that). You can’t insert images or videos you record.

On the other hand, Notion (below) does offer more multimedia file support and a web clipper. The clipper makes it easy to save content from the web into Notion.

note tools

Free users in Notion get unlimited number of pages and you get a variety of page types. Now, Notion is quite powerful. You may find that it can support your needs as you work to organize them.

The Personal Pro Plan is free for students and educators. This lets you collaborate with unlimited guests and gives you version history. Sign up with your school email address and you’ll immediately gain access to these features.

Change the email associated with your account to your school email address to get it for free. If you’re on our free Education Plan, you’ve been upgraded to the Personal Pro Plan.

Visit the help center to learn more.

If you need a mobile-friendly app, then Notion may be the one (great eight-minute video) you are looking for. There are several video tutorials. Need a simple, minimalist note-taking tool? Give SimpleNote a spin.

Encryption Recommendation: Encrypt your content before you save it or sync it by using a text encryption tool.

Wrap-Up

None of these notes tools are perfect, although Zoho Notebook comes close. It all depends on what you need. If you work a lot with graphics, you can import images into Notion to display them. My favorite tool for writing? StackEdit. What are you going to use?

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Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

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notebook with pencil
Content AreasGood TeachingWriting

Note-Taking and Outlining: Five Digital Helpers

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Wish you had an easy way to annotate websites or research articles and then share them with others? Do you need to guide high school and/or college students in the area of note-taking? If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog entry, I’ll feature a few digital tools that should come in handy for this purpose. At the end, I will share my recommendations.

Before we do that, let’s revisit the importance of note-taking and annotating content.

A Note-Taking Strategy That Works

Many educators are now familiar with the research that the act of handwriting your notes gets you results. Consider this quote from NPR’s interview with research study authors Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Pam A. Mueller. The authors sought to test how handwritten notes affect learning compared to notes taken using a computer or digital device.

“The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies had to be more selective. You can’t write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.”

The researchers noted the two types of note-taking and defined them in this way:

  • Generative: Summarizing, paraphrasing, concept-mapping characterize this approach.
  • Nongenerative: Verbatim copying describes this approach.

As you might imagine, the generative approach has a greater impact on learning. According to another study, researchers found that handwritten notes also engage your senses. As a result, the act of note-taking makes your brain more active. Learning improves because of your brain’s activity (Source).

Hattie’s Mindset

As you might imagine, John Hattie’s meta-analysis of note-taking research reveals something, too. That is, that note-taking has an effect size of .51, which accelerates student growth in one year. Remember that standard growth has an effect size of .40, so anything greater than .40 is beneficial.

While handwritten notes do much, it is the acts they force us to engage in that actually yield results. Those acts take place during generative note-taking and include:

As you can see, each of these activities has the potential to speed up student growth in one year. Two other strategies are also useful here. The first is outlining and summarizing (effect size of .66). Defined below, this .66 effect size strategy can be quite effective (edited for blog):

Identifying the main ideas and rendering them in one’s own words. The core skill is being able to distinguish between  main ideas and supporting ideas. Or, main ideas and examples

The second is spaced vs mass practice (effect size of .65) . Notes, outlines, and summaries allows us to remember information over time. We can refer to this strategy:

Students are better able to commit information to memory. This happens when they study that information in spaced (or distributed) intervals. Studying “massed” interval(s) does not work as well as spaced.

Studying information over shorter sessions in a longer period of time yields benefits. Given the value of notes, outlines, and summaries, we can revisit content again and again. Providing this information up front to students would help them.

Change That Adds Value

A change that adds value is one definition for “innovation.” In this case, the technology tools shown below are innovations. They not only ease post note-taking, but address the other strategies that work.

Technology enhances outlining and summarizing, making it easy to outline and annotate. The ability to revisit content is helpful here, as is how we interact with that content together.

Let’s explore some digital tools that can provide better support to students’ efforts with strategies that work.

Five Digital Tools

You may be familiar with some of these tools already or be exploring them for the first time. My goal in sharing them is that you do so with the strategies that work in mind. Share these with your students. I address age appropriateness in the descriptions.

outlining

Tool #1: Diigo

Diigo.com is a social bookmarking tool. While the social aspect of learning is important, Diigo does more. It lets you create digital outlines, bookmarks, and highlight websites. You can get a Chrome/Firefox extension, too.

annotating

Diigo makes it easy to annotate and add comments to web pages. You can share your annotations/comments with others and can also do the following:

  • Highlight critical features of text (essential text or text to NOT read)
  • Ask students to define words, terms, or concepts in their own words/language
  • Provide definitions of difficult/new terms
  • Mark up online text with comments, observations, and corrections
  • Add bookmarks for the students to interact with
  • Use the highlighting and sticky notes like a word processor’s Track Changes feature

I first started using Diigo in 2008. There’s a lot to like in Diigo, even if “social bookmarking” has fallen by the wayside. You can see that tools that work, like outlining and summarizing, endure.

Tool #2: Hypothes.is

“Visible, active, and social.” That’s how the no-cost Hypothes.is tool describes itself. Hypothes.is makes it possible for students to “write in the margins” and annotate online text. Even more important, it makes that work social if needed.

Like Diigo, it offers both private and public commenting/annotation options and includes a variety of online resources/videos for those who want to get started:

Are you a Canvas LMS user? How about moodle, Sakai, Schoology, or Blackboard? Or D2L’s Brightspace? If so, you may be happy to learn that Hypothes.is integrates with all of those. You need only add the app to your learning management system (LMS) of choice. There are also resource guides for students and teachers.

Tool #3: Mendeley

Aimed at higher education, Mendeley allows you to annotate what you read. Some of its features include:

  • Add your thoughts on documents in your own library, even from mobile devices
  • Share documents with groups of colleagues and annotate them together
  • Import paper and other documents from your device, existing libraries, or websites
  • Automatic capture of author, title ,and publisher information
  • Have all your annotations and library backed up to the cloud

Mendeley offers “cite as you write” plugins. That means that if you use Microsoft Word or LibreOffice, Mendeley has you covered and supports more than 8,000 citation styles. Although a research tool, you are able to engage in shared annotation like Diigo and Hypothes.is. And, unlike Diigo, but like Hypothes.is, it is no cost.

Tool #4: WeavaTools

WeavaTools has a variety of features at varying costs. It offers some basic citation styles, but nothing like Mendeley. With WeavaTools, you can highlight text, make annotations, clip images, and organize your clips. The free version includes some simple export options like Word, Excel, text, and CSV. The premium version has a monthly cost.

Tool #5: Zotero

Zotero offers collection, organization, citation, and research-sharing options. Although a no-cost service, you can choose to upgrade your storage. This allows you to save everything you have on the computer version of Zotero to the cloud. Zotero works on a variety of platforms. It is more of a citation and research sharing tool. This makes it useful to college students. Some might consider it too complex for high school students, unless advanced.

Using the Five Digital Helpers

If you’re looking for tools to assist you in outlining and summarizing, then these may meet your needs. My recommendation is to take a hard look at Diigo.com and Hypothes.is for use in high school classrooms. Mendeley is great for advanced high school and college students.

Updated 02/09/2021: Added an infographic.

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Cornell note-taking
Microsoft

Go Digital with Cornell Note-Taking and the OneNote App

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Back in September, 2016, I had just begun working with Microsoft OneNote to setup a Cornell Notes type page in OneNote Desktop (a.k.a. OneNote 2016). Since then, Microsoft has made tremendous updates to its free OneNote app on Windows 10. The popular app, which works on iOS, Android, and Mac, has a different way of getting things done. As a result, my earlier guide to Cornell Notes is now a bit dated. To reflect the new OneNote app on Windows 10, I’ve created a whole new guide. Since OneNote 2016 is still in use in many districts, I’m leaving my earlier step-by-step online.

Learn More About Cornell Note-Taking

Don’t know about Cornell note-taking? I know I hadn’t heard about it until I attended AVID training a score of years ago. Here’s a bit of history about it as an approach that’s been around since the 1940s. Wikipedia shares the following:

The Cornell Notes system (also Cornell note-taking system, Cornell method, or Cornell way) is a note-taking system devised in the 1940s by Walter Pauk, an education professor at Cornell University. Pauk advocated its use in his best-selling book How to Study in College.

The Cornell method provides a systematic format for condensing and organizing notes. This system of taking notes is important as a high school or college level student. The student divides the paper into two columns: the note-taking column (usually on the right) is twice the size of the questions/key word column (on the left). The student should leave five to seven lines, or about two inches (5 cm), at the bottom of the page. Learn More

Ready to see the Cornell note-taking template in OneNote? Before I show you that, did you know you can customize pages in OneNote, as well as insert tables to help organize your content?

Customizing Pages in the OneNote App

As wonderful as the OneNote app on Windows 10 is, you won’t find templates like you did in OneNote 2016 (a.k.a. OneNote Desktop). The most you will find is the ability to customize the number of ruled lines on a Page. You can do this under the View menu, as shown in the screenshot below:

Note that you can also change the color of a Page. This is, so far, the sum total of Page customization in the OneNote app. OneNote Desktop/2016 templates are just a feature not (yet) present in the app. That raises the question, how can you create your own templates for students?

Creating Your Own Templates for Students

Creating your own Pages in OneNote is easy. To make your own template, you will need to get comfortable with inserting tables. What’s neat is that you can shade different cells in the table to reflect information.

Need Directions? Want to add a shade of color to an individual table cell? Click in the table cell you want to shade, then go to the Table tab in your OneNote navigation bar. Click on Shading, then pick the color you want the cell to be shaded as.

In the OneNote app, you are able to create a page (or copy and paste) with the format of a Cornell Note-Taking page. To accomplish that, you will need to open an existing notebook with the template, then copy and paste the frame that has the template. Once you have customized the template the way you want, you can use OneNote Class Notebook to distribute that page to all students.

You may choose to place the template(s) in your Class Notebook’s Content Library so that students can copy and paste a blank copy. The video in the next section below will take you step-by-step through the process.

Get a Cornell Note-Taking Template or Two

To get you started, I’ve placed a completely editable OneNote notebook with Cornell note-taking templates online for your use. You can navigate to this notebook, then copy and paste the frame of the page from my pages to your OneNote Notebook. Here’s a video that models the process:

That’s pretty much all there is to it! Have questions? Don’t hesitate to leave them as a comment below and I’ll get back to you with an answer.

Did You Know?

Want to share a OneNote notebook with others? Marjolein Hoekstra (@OneNoteC) says “It’s no longer necessary to give people edit rights to a notebook. Place the notebook on OneDrive.live.com (using a free Microsoft account). Follow these steps:

  1. Share the READ ONLY link to the notebook
  2. Sign in with a personal Microsoft account. This will make a button available labeled “Open in OneNote”
  3. Once the notebook is open on the OneNote app, they can copy the Cornell template pages to their own notebook

This approach will NOT work with Office 365 accounts.

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ChromebooksGoogle Tips and TricksiOS Tips and TricksMicrosoft

Note-Taking on Chromebooks

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Have a class set of iPads, but your district has chosen to move to Chromebooks? You’re not the only one. What do you do when you are using an indispensable iOS app that isn’t available for the Chrome browser? Finding another option can be tough. Consider this challenge that one educator had:

My district is planning to move from iPads to Chromebooks. One of the biggest concerns raised is that many of the teachers and students rely on Notability. Has anyone else faced this? If so, how did you handle it?

Notability is an iPad app, unavailable on the Chrome browser. Why? Consider what Notability can do:

Combine handwriting, photos and typing in a single note to bring your projects to life. Use a wide range of note-taking and sketching tools to capture every detail. You can even add and annotate PDFs in Notability. It’s the perfect place to create and organize work, school, and life’s information! Experiment with different tools to create beautiful, hand-crafted notes and sketches. Continue to scale, rotate, and recolor your ideas and sketches until your notes are just how you want them. Once you’re done, organize your notes.

This app makes it a cinch to share your creations via various cloud storage options (e.g. Google Drive or Dropbox). It makes sharing via email and AirDrop do-able as well. Making the transition from this note-taking app to another can be difficult.

Let’s take a look at note-taking apps on Chromebooks before we discuss alternatives to Notability.

Chromebook Touch Screen

Chromebooks now come in many sizes and shapes and even offer touch screen support. You might consider any one of these models for purchase.

A key feature in each of these models is the touch screen, allowing students to draw on the screen itself. You may consider the Acer Chromebook Tab 10, a tablet, as another option with a stylus. The question is, “What Chromebook add-on or app could be used as an alternative to the iOS Notability app?”

Chrome Alternatives to Notability

There are various alternatives to Notability available. Here are a few that Google Certified Trainers recommend.

Web version of Xodo app

Alternative #1: Xodo

“Our district is switching to Chromebooks and we are training staff and students to use Xodo!” says Stephanie Draayer, Technology Integration Specialist and Google Certified Trainer (Twitter; website). You may recall, Xodo was featured in a TCEA blog entry, Top Five PDF Annotation Tools for Windows. In that blog entry, I share the following:

With the Xodo web app, you can now merge multiple PDFs into one, which is perfect for when you need to compile resources into one package to send to your colleagues. And now you can merge PDFs from your computer and Google Drive.

The new Xodo web app provides more flexibility than ever before. You can now insert, delete, reorder, and even rotate pages to manipulate your PDF to fit your needs…Xodo can also open other file formats such as docx, pptx, jpeg, png, cbz, and other image files.

This makes Xodo on Chromebooks an excellent choice for a variety of reasons. You can open files from Google Drive and Dropbox, as well as edit existing PDFs that may exist on the web. Annotating a PDF of a concept map is quite easy. With your finger or a stylus, you can draw anywhere on the screen. One limit is that you are stuck with black as the color of choice for your pen.

Since Xodo is available at no cost, works great on mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) and on your desktop computer (e.g. Mac, Windows), it is a great choice as a simple Notability replacement. It offers many other options for PDF and image annotation, so give it a shot. I use it on all my devices.

Alternative #2: Kami

Offering free, teacher ($99 annual), and custom district/school pricing, some suggest Kami as an alternative to Notability. Unlike Xodo, you will need to create a Kami account. And, to work with images, you will have to upgrade from the free account. That said, if you will be working with a lot of PDF files, you will be able to do quite a bit. Note all the features available with Kami as represented with the side toolbar.

Worth checking out are the comment options. You can leave text, audio, and video comments and have access to a color palette, options lacking in Xodo. The main drawback is the cost.

Alternative #3: OneNote

A short two years ago, Microsoft’s OneNote would not have been on my list of apps to recommend for Chromebook. In that short time since, however, Microsoft has revamped and enhanced OneNote, adding an incredible amount of features. While Xodo is one of my favorites, I often rely on the Microsoft OneNote app on Windows 10, Chromebook for capturing content from the web. The OneNote Web Clipper add-on for Chrome makes that a simple process.

You can insert images, Microsoft Office documents, and, of course, PDFs. This is all through the OneNote Online interface, which is 100% web-based. You also have access to simple draw features, as represented below:

That’s not all. In addition to being able to draw, highlight text, and insert text boxes, you can record audio and take advantage of the built-in accessibility options (e.g. Immersive Reader).

What’s more, availability of the OneNote app on Windows 10, Mac, Android, and iOS make this a cross-platform tool. Amazing as these options are in a Chrome browser, students need to have only a free Microsoft account to access them. In schools or districts that have provisioned staff and students with Office 365 accounts, you get to also use the Class Notebook add-on for OneNote. Teachers can manage OneNote Class Notebook via the web browser; view the video guide. This can be powerful, OneNote and Google Classroom integration options now available. Check out Marija’s OneNote Notebook 6-week course, as well as Nico Paphitis’ resources on OneNote.

OneNote has potential for student-paced adaptive learning. See this video from OneNote expert Nicos Paphitis (@PaphitisN).

Note-Taking on Chromebooks

As you can see, there is a rich variety of tools that could meet your needs as you seek to exchange iPads for flexible Chromebook devices. While the alternatives shared above are not a perfect replacement for Notability, good options do exist. These are only a few of the more robust tools. After all, I didn’t mention two other favorites of mine, Web Paint Chrome add-on for drawing/painting on web pages and Screencastify for screencasting and annotation. Google Keep offers drawing tools that can be inserted into Google Docs and it integrates into Google Drawing.

Give note-taking on Chromebooks a try. You won’t go back.

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Educational TrendsGoogle Tips and TricksMicrosoft

Tools to Take the Best Notes at the 2018 TCEA Convention

by Susan Meyer
written by Susan Meyer

The 2018 TCEA Convention & Exposition is in full swing as educators from all over the nation have come together to learn about the latest trends in educational technology and to build on their professional development. With sessions for every role in education, the convention may take a bit of planning in what sessions to attend and what information to retain. To make the most of your convention experience, taking good notes is essential. After all, what good is taking amazing notes if you can’t find what you need in them in a few weeks or months? The best way to ensure that your convention learning (and any learning, for that matter) remains fresh and easily searched is to use one of the great note taking tools that are available to educators.

The Top Three Note-Taking Tools

Some of the best tools that may help you write the most beneficial notes are Google Keep, OneNote, and Evernote. All of these tools are currently free to use (a big plus!). They have a similar purpose, but also unique features that set each one apart.

Google Keep

Google Keep has standard note-taking features such as automatic saves, ability to share the finished product, and checkboxes. In addition, it has the ability to send reminders about the notes you take and has a built-in OCR. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) means that the system can not only recognize text, but also graphic images such as drawings or illustrations or sketch notes. With these added features, Google Keep is great for jotting something down quick while also giving you room to organize and build on your notes to make them more detailed. Its design is simple for content to be easy to write or find.

Note Taking with OneNote

OneNote is a little more robust than Google Keep because it provides the ability to create internal links. This can allow you to link to a particular Twitter account or chat or to a PDF handout link from a presenter. It also can hold more characters than Google Keep, making it perfect for keeping notes from multiple events and years. These features allow your notes to be a little more in-depth and organized. One disadvantage of OneNote, however, is its inability to recover deleted items, which may be an issue when you’re bouncing session to session.

Evernote

Following Google Keep and OneNote is Evernote. Like OneNote, Evernote is more robust with a feature that integrates with third-party services through APIs. This lets you connect it to other applications such as Outlook or Google Drive. You can see what else works with OneNote here. However, with a more complex design, it lags in speed and consistency across all devices. The best way use Evernote is in its web version.

There are plenty of ways to take great, useful notes. To recap, Google Keep is simply designed and made for quick notes that you can put into greater depth at a later time while OneNote offers a happy medium of more detailed, organizational features. If you are using the web version, Evernote offers copious possibilities. No matter your note-taking style, one of these tools will is sure to help you take your best 2018 TCEA Convention notes.

 

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Microsoft

Digitizing Cornell Note-Taking with OneNote

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Earlier this summer, I received an email from Port Arthur ISD teacher, Hope Scott. Hope shared the following:

Our campus uses Cornell Notes, and I’d love to see/share what it looks like in OneNote.

OneNote

Looking for a Cornell Note-taking template to use in OneNote? Take a look at this short video tutorial (scroll to Relevant Links section at blog’s end and click on link #3) on how to get them. There are various Cornell Notes templates online, as well as note-taking templates you can use that are built into OneNote.  Let’s take a quick look, shall we?

OneNote Page Templates

You can find templates in OneNote 2016. These are located in OneNote 2016 under the Insert menu as Page Templates. In the screenshot, you can see more Page Templates, including some decorative ones. This is well-worth exploring.

Image 563

If you switch to View menu, you can also make further adjustments that affect page color and/or Rule Lines. You can also decide what kind of paper you want to see appear in your OneNote Notebook, whether it will just be a blank white sheet of paper or include ruled lines.

Other Sources for OneNote Templates

In the video linked at the bottom of this blog entry, I’ll be showing you some of those templates, as well as where you can find some templates that I’ve pulled off the web. I hope these tips will save you some time. Before going much further, I definitely want to credit the awesome work the OneNoteGem.com folks have done in preparing this and many other formats. You definitely need to pay them a visit and see what else they have. To save educators effort and confusion (that’s good, right?), I’ve taken the liberty of placing a variety of templates online.

When you go there, you will see a OneDrive space where you can right click and save files to your computer. For the purposes of this video, I’ll be using OneNote 2016. Right-click and save the template you want (for example, Cornell Note-Taking) to your Windows device. Then double-click on it and choose to open it with OneNote 2016. It will open as a loose section.

From this point, you can copy and paste it into another OneNote 2016 Notebook, including a Class Notebook. Once there, you can also choose to distribute it to your students. That’s pretty much all there is to it! Have questions? Don’t hesitate to leave them as a comment below and I’ll get back to you with an answer.

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iOS Tips and Tricks

Collaborative Note-Taking on the iPad Just Got Easier

by Lori Gracey
written by Lori Gracey

Having students collaborate while taking notes or working on a project on the iPad can be a real pain. Getting everyone’s email address so that they can share the document, finding where the completed version is stored in the cloud (or on the device), getting to the document without Internet access — all of these can give a teacher a big headache.

But now there’s an app that can solve the biggest challenges of working collaboratively. MolaSync works on any iOS device, and it’s completely free.

MolaSync is a full-featured collaboration app that also includes many special communication tools. When you first open it, you’re greeted with a blank screen with a selection of drawing tools around the edges. You can invite someone to collaborate with you via email, iMessage, and Twitter with just one tap.

Once you begin drawing, writing, or recording your voice (yes, it includes a handy voice recorder so you can explain your document!), all of your work will be automatically saved to the cloud. If you don’t have access to the Internet at the time, your work will be saved to the device and then automatically uploaded to the cloud once you have access. You can export your creation to iTunes, Photos, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Baidu Cloud, or you can open it up in another app (like Explain Everything). You can even bring in Google Maps with the simple touch of a button. And don’t worry about filling up the page; MolaSync provides you with an unlimited long/wide page design that’s perfect for big projects.

MolaSync is an excellent tool for storyboarding presentations or projects, taking group notes on a complex subject, explaining a math or science problem, designing a solution to a PBL question, and so much more. It is one of those must-have apps for the iOS world because even very young students are able to master it. And it makes learning collaboratively simple.

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