3 Fun Strategies for taking Notes

Taking notes is one of the few things my students despise—and I don’t blame them. Taking notes is not something that most people love doing. It’s quite easy to lose attention while listening to long, continuous lectures, regardless of the teacher’s intensity or the student’s devotion.

And lectures may be just as tedious for professors as they are for students. Few professors enjoy hearing their own voices for a full class hour.

NOTING DOWN  is REALLY an important part of many classroom curricula since lecturing is perhaps the most effective method to transmit knowledge to pupils rapidly, but we may strive to improve the practice. 

These three tactics assist students and teachers in making taking notes more enjoyable and interesting.

  1. Many professors, like myself, depend significantly on PowerPoint or Google Slides to deliver lecture notes. Instead of the traditional teacher-as-presenter and student-as-listener arrangement, consider printing out your presentation and distributing it across your classroom or a nearby corridor. Students can take notes by hand while roaming about and viewing the slides using clipboards or books as a hard surface. If you have a big class, consider printing and posting two versions of your presentation so that students may move if there are too many students taking notes on one slide. This method is a simple way to add more physical movement into the classroom, particularly during a typically sedentary activity such as note-taking. It works especially effectively when children are acquiring knowledge that does not follow a logical progression (e.g., the six traits of writing, the parts of a cell, etc.). I give my ninth-grade students a visual organizer so they can keep track of which slides they have and haven’t made notes on.

Another advantage of this approach is that students may work at their own speed. Create a review tool for students who finish taking notes sooner so they may practice and apply what they’ve learned. My pupils create flashcards or utilize their laptops to access a Quizlet game that has already been created.

  1. Provide students with a list of questions that would have previously been addressed in a lecture. Allow them to choose a topic of interest and conduct research on it, either alone or in groups. You may wish to give pupils a renowned text set to verify the material they utilize is accurate. This assures that they will use high-quality sources while taking up less class time than searching for sources. Finally, have the students teach the answer to their questions to one another. Students have seen hundreds of lesson plans and frequently have excellent suggestions for their own. While students might be required to educate their peers in a number of ways, I established the following expectations for my pupils: They should have a five-minute presentation, a brief review game (extra points if it gets listeners out of their seats! ), and a five-question quiz for the audience as a formative evaluation. Students understand stuff far better when they consider it from the teacher’s point of view rather than merely taking notes.
  1. Give your pupils a copy of notes identical to those they would take during a lecture for this strategy. Then tell them that some of the information in the notes is false. At this stage, it is the students’ responsibility to conduct research on the material you have provided. Make them work in pairs to give a collaborative element to the lesson. You may also consider awarding a modest, significant incentive to the first three to five groups of students that appropriately alter the notes. The competitive factor will push pupils to work effectively while discouraging them from disclosing their discoveries to everyone else. This note-taking approach necessitates collaboration, evaluative abilities, and common sense. Students must analyze which information in the notes is likely and which is not, and then discover the proper information to replace it. This lesson, like walking notes, benefited from a review or application task after students complete it. Students who finish early will have additional time in class to examine the material as other students complete fact-checking their notes.

Some days, taking notes is simply unavoidable. With all of the stuff that must be taught and the limited time of a class period, taking notes may be the easiest and quickest approach to communicating knowledge. These three lesson methods may help to make the process more interesting in your classroom, as they have in mine.

Carter Martin

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