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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!"

Below you will be introduced to some online note-taking tools.  At first these tools may appear to simply encourage students to "cut & paste" -- should we really encourage them to "clip" sections from online resources?  Or do the tools help teach the concepts of breaking down information into manageable pieces, paraphrasing, and organizing.  You decide. 

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Google Notebook

According to LifeHacker's article "Hive Five: Five Best Note-Taking Tools", Google Notebook "is a web-based note-taking application that brings Google's familiar interface and excellent search capabilities to your notes. The application includes a rich-text editor, labeling (Google's version of tagging), and the recent integration with Google Bookmarks. The Google Notebook add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer makes adding notes and clips to Google Notebook a breeze."

• Since you already have a Google Account, you can just log in to the Notebook with your Google username and password. 

• You may be prompted to add an extension to your browser.  If not, go to Google Notebook add-on and download the Google Notebook extension.  An icon and the words "Open Notebook" will appear in the lower right-hand corner of your browser.  If you click on the little blue notebook, a small window will pop-up so that you can take notes about whatever you are browsing on the web.  Here's why.

• Watch the demo, but you may find the FAQ's to be more helpful. You may also want to browse the Official Google Notebook Blog.

• Read Advice for Students: Taking Notes that Work by Dustin Wax and practice taking some notes from the article. 
  

Clipmarks

Like many web 2.0 tools, Clipmarks defies categorization.  While it is certainly a note-taking tool, it also has elements of social bookmarking, social networking, and more.  For now, we'll focus on the personal benefits of how Clipmarks takes notes.  Watch this demo for a quick example:

Looks simple, eh?  To get started,

• Go to clipmarks.com and click on Sign Up in the upper right-hand corner.

• Enter your email address, a username, and a password -- and make sure you use usernames and passwords that will be easy to remember!  Note that you have to type a couple of words in the security box on the right and then click I accept. Create my Account.

• Once you are in the site, click on Install in the upper right-hand corner.  You can watch the demo for how to install the clipmarks button for your browser, or just click on either the Install for Firefox button or the Install for Internet Explorer button and follow the instructions.

• Once you have the extension downloaded on your brower, you can start clipping as the demo showed you.  Go to Teaching Paragraph Summarization Strategies by Special Connections to practice clipping.  You can either Save it to your page in Clipmarks, Email it to yourself or others, send it to your Blog, or Print it.  Try them all!
  

• Note that you can put your clipmarks in folders, mark them private, add tags, and add comments.  One nice thing about the Comments is that you are only allowed 1000 characters which forces one to succintly summarize -- which is one of our goals.  You will find that you can only publicly clipmark portions under 1000 characters; if you clipmark more than that amount it will automatically be private.
  

• You may want to read the FAQ's and explore the rest of the Help section.  

Explore

Explore the following tools and think about how they could be used to teach summarizing, paraphrasing, or notetaking: 

• Awesome Highlighter
  

• Cramberry

• Diigo

Application

Take a look at this lesson plan -- Please No Posers: Learning to Paraphrase without Plagiarizing.  Do you think this lesson could be "updated" using one of the above note-taking tools?  If so, how?  If not, why?  (Note that the article it refers to is in the box on the top, right-side of the page.)

Go Even Deeper

There are some awesome notetaking tools out there that are used by numerous people. We are not covering them here because they require a download and are complex, but as teachers, it would be good for you to be aware of them.

• Evernote
  
  • 7 Ways to Use Evernote
    

• Zotero
  
  • 7 Things You Should Know about Zotero
    

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• What was your experience with these online note-taking tools? 

• Compare the two: what are the pros and cons of each of them.

• Do you see an educational purpose for using online note-taking tools?  Why or why not?

• If you had taken LifeHacker's poll about note-taking, what would you have listed as your favorite?

• How do you teach students to take notes?  Summarize?  Paraphrase?  Share your successful strategies!

• Do you agree that these are hard skills to teach?  Why or why not?