Effective Note Taking Strategies with Middle School Students

Currently, a hot topic in the education world is note taking.  Research is pointing towards pencil and paper notes as opposed to typed notes.  Why?  Our students all have devices, so why would we make them use a pencil and paper to take notes in class?

My humble opinion is that balance and student choice are both very important.  What can you do with students at the end of a lesson that requires them to use their device to demonstrate understanding and creativity?  There are lots of options.  Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of presenting 6 note taking strategies (a good mix of pencil paper as well as technology based.)  Specifically, the tools we and note taking strategies we introduced were:

- Cornell Notes (both electronic and primitive)
- Mind Map / Concept Maps (both electronic using Lucidchart as well as primative)
- Graphical note taking (paper and pencil only)
- Using Pear Deck (interactive presentation software) take aways
- Post-it Note note taking
- Collaborative note taking (using google docs)

Do you have any favorite note taking strategies you use to encourage students to think deeply about your content?

You can check out the presentation and notes/resources here:  https://goo.gl/NQ5LAS