Notetaking In The Digital Classroom: A Blended Learning Approach
Note-taking is part-and-parcel to the academic learning experience.
Often during lecture, but also experiments, interviews, and field research, understanding what’s important and recording it for future reference is central to the learning process–curation before we called it that. (You can see Darmouth’s resources for notetaking here.)
So it may come as a surprise that according to a 2010 study, only 66.5% of students take notes. And of those students, there is often no structure or strategy. The Cornell Notes strategy is one possible model students can use, in addition to combination notes, REAP strategy, and others. When used in combination with technology, students are able to activate key brain areas during learning, while also retaining critical information for future review.
How Noteaking Is Changing
It’d be easy to fall victim to hyperbole here and suggest that notetaking is the stuff of electricity and holograms, but that’s only partly true. Today, 40% of students prefer a mix of physical and digital notes. In the digital classroom then, the primary shift parallels blended learning: a mix of physical and electronic information that serves as a compromise between “old” and “new” learning.
In the digital classroom, recording pens, tablets, laptops, audio software, and social media make recording, reviewing, sharing, and storing these notes different than it was even 10 years ago. The infographic below explores how.
Infographic source coursehero.com