Three Ways of Taking Notes

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  1. notes.io – Notes.io is an online note-taking site that makes it easy for students (and teachers) to take and share notes.  It is still in its early days, but it works well and allows one-time notes that are easy to be shared by automatically creating a short url (such as notes.io/2w).  For a longer set of notes, perhaps something like pen.io would be more appropriate, essentially providing an incredibly easy blogging solution that doesn’t need any sign-ups.  After choosing a username (such as mrdrake.pen.io and an unchangeable password, students can create a blog for taking notes, and by sharing the password can make the set of notes collaborative.  This platform allows rich editing and embedding of pictures and video as well as links.  For an even more distraction-free solution, there is PenZen, which is built on top of pen.io, and allows either saving to pen.io or a pdf (useful!)
  2. Google Docs – nothing says collaboration like Google Docs, and if you are lucky and in a school that has integrated it with the school system, it makes it even easier.  Google Docs has proven to be a great note-taking system, both for individual students and collaboratively, on top of the office suite you’d expect from them.  Documents allow equation editing, which makes it appropriate for taking notes in Maths, and the ability to share and embed documents is invaluable.  If students are of the mind-map type, then there is drawing functionality, and again, the ability for it to be collaborative is fantastic.
  3. Your Learning Management System – this should go without saying, really.  If you have a LMS at your school, and most do these days, giving students the ability to create notes is a fantastic method of both collaborative learning and formative assessment.  Allowing students access to a wiki gives them a rich platform to create and extend their own notes.  Requiring students to submit their notes at the end of a module or term gives them impetus to be mindful of reflecting on what they are actually learning.  Whether the above resources are used as well or not, note-taking should really be made a core component of the learning environment, and your LMS is there to be used.

Desmos Graphing Calculator

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Having talked about graphing calculators in my last post, Free Tech 4 Teachers has pointed me to an even more powerful yet simple to use calculator than my previous favourite graph.tk.  Desmos Graphing Calculator has a lot of features, such as setting bounds, inequalities, summations, polar, etc… while still keeping a nice Web 2.0 interface and allowing you to save a short link to save your work and/or share.  Unfortunately it is Flash-based, making it unsuitable for a lot of mobile phones and iPads, but it still perfect for laptop schools and demonstrations.