The geeky moment/question:
I used the note-taking app Notability last Tuesday and today to
practice text marking an article. The kids did well with the discussion and
using pre-, during-, and post-reading strategies and connecting text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. Their first attempt at writing with a
stylus or their fingers, however, produced mixed results. So now I need to figure out if
I should give them more time to practice this skill over the next few weeks, or
should I avoid frustrating them and instead move in to typing notes in
Notability instead? Is writing on a tablet really a necessary skill for them to learn? I'm not sure whose advice to
get about this. There's probably not much research out there on this, right? Hmmm.
The geeky details:
Last week I picked a brief ESPN.com article on how the Chicago
White Sox had gotten swept by the Tigers that weekend since about half my class
told me they are White Sox fans during the general interest inventory. It's possible their interest in the White Sox came as a result of my sharing that the Sox are my all-time favorite team (when I projected my own interest inventory as a sample for theirs). Today I picked an article from USA Today about how the presidental candidates are putting aside negative advertising out of respect for the anniversary of 9/11. Both articles seemed to work well to keep them engaged. I only have 14 students, and I'm not ready yet to teach them the whole work flow process using something like Dropbox, so instead, I just created a group email list and then emailed them the article. Together we walked through how to open a file from email into Notability, and we walked through the basics of the app. They seemed to pick it up quickly and helped each other too. At the end, I just had them share it back with me via email. I figured I'd do this for a few weeks before adding the element of another new app/system.
Most of my students took all the notes, but about half of them have notes that are barely readable. They are big, messy, and all over the place. This week, one of the boys actually handwrote half his notes with the stylus but created text boxes and typed some of the notes, without my ever teaching them this method. Maybe I should ask him to show them what he did and why, and then let them choose whichever version they prefer, as long as it produces similar results.
I used Notability again this week for text marking, and this time around, I had one of my boys show the rest of the class how he did text boxes. We played around with that for a few minutes to let them practice. Then I told them they could either use the styllus to write their text marks, or if they preferred, they could type the comments. Pretty much all of them chose to type most of the comments and then only write out the more brief ones. So I guess that was resolved pretty easily.
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