See Also: Month 7, Thing 11, Thing 20

Introduction

Even before the age of "cut & paste" teachers struggled to teach students how to take good notes and summarize what they learned from lectures and reading. 

The section about summarizing from ReadingQuest.org says, "Please be warned: teaching summarizing is no small undertaking. It's one of the hardest strategies for students to grasp, and one of the hardest strategies for you to teach. You have to repeatedly model it and give your students ample time and opportunities to practice it. But it is such a valuable strategy and competency. Can you imagine your students succeeding in school without being able to break down content into manageable small succinct pieces? We ask students to summarize all the time, but we're terrible about teaching them good ways to do this!"

We are not advocating for paper & pencil notetaking to be abandoned. Sometimes this is the best way to learn something new, and there are many great strategies which can be implemented. But there are also several online tools which can be used (or re-purposed) to get students to take notes -- useful & meaningful notes!

Some of the best information about notetaking, summarizing, and paraphrasing is from Purdue University's Writing Lab: 

• Avoiding Plagiarism: Overview & Contradictions
  • Is it Plagiarism Yet?
  • Safe Practices 
• Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
  • Paraphrase: Write it in Your Own Words

Also, Princeton University's Acedemic Integrity information is also very useful:

• When to Cite Sources
• Working Habits that Work
• The Question of Collaboration

And finally, Plagiarism.org has some good information:

• Preventing Plagiarism when Writing
• What is Citation?
• Printable Handouts

How To

• Today's Meet: Read about Today's Meet's creation. Here is another bit about it.

• Edmodo: Edmodo has more functions than just chat/microblogging. Here is one teacher who uses Edmodo. And here is what his students have to say. Jose Pichardo also created this presentation which illustrates some functions of Edmodo:(Since I can't get the presentation to embed, here is the link to it on Slideshare): http://www.slideshare.net/zemote/edmodocom-microblogging-for-education-presentation

• Think about the other tools we have covered in MILI. How could these tools be used to help students learn how to take good notes, summarize, paraphrase, and not plagiarize?
  • Google Documents
  • Google Reader
  • Blogger
  • PbWiki
  • Delicious
  • Podcasting (2nd year participants)

Other Options

See Thing 11.