Tag Archives: note-taking

Personalized Interactive Notebooks

This post was sponsored by Five Star® as part of an Influencer Activation for Influence Central and all opinions expressed in my post are my own.

As much as I love our 1:1 Chromebook situation and moving more of my projects and assignments online, I still require my students to keep a notebook for my class. I want my students to be bilingual in the sense that they can navigate through online documents and responses, but they can also grab a notebook and a pen at any time and make meaning of content. Different students process information differently, so I believe they need choice when it comes to how they organize and lay out their notes and questions.

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I enlisted the talents of four of my amazing students to test out four different Five Star® Interactive Notebooks and see how each style helped them keep their information and tools organized.

Hailie chose this Five Star® Customizable Interactive Notebook (College Ruled). Her favorite feature was the customizable cover. She can slip in a cover page for any subject, and then switch it out at any time. The cover is super durable and will protect any other papers that she might slip in there if she is running late at the end of class.

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She utilized the margins on the right hand side for chapter titles so that she could easily find the sections she needed to study or refer to. She loves adding her own banners for subheadings, and there is plenty of uncluttered space for her to lay out vocabulary words and main ideas under each banner.

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Jessie chose the Five Star® Customizable Interactive Composition Book (College Ruled) for her English notebook. She also loved the customizable cover, and she trimmed hers down so that it would fit perfectly. The smooth edge never gets caught on anything in her backpack, and the inside pages open to a more natural two-page layout.

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She created a contrasting layout for a piece of informational text about the leadership styles of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. She used the margins to note the lines and page numbers where she found textual evidence about each figure. She delineated her own commentary by setting it off with highlighted boxes so that she could easily translate these notes into an essay the next day. And does she not just have the most beautiful handwriting you’ve ever seen?

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Rachel preferred the Five Star® College Ruled Interactive Notebook because she could store so much in the first section. There is a full-size pocket to store handouts, as well has a half-page pocket where she can keep stickers, page flags, or sticky notes.

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All of these Five Star® Notebooks also have a handy reinforced Table of Contents section at the beginning. I used to always print a Table of Contents for my students and have them fill it in as we went through the year, but this one is much more durable, and there’s no extra work for me!

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Rachel went through the same text about Davis and Lincoln and kept track of important quotes as she read. She added her own commentary underneath the quotes, and then jotted down connections that came to her in the margin where she kept a “notes” section.

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Another cool feature at the back of these notebooks is the extendable grid, for plotting points on a chart, creating schedules, mapping out a room, making a bullet journal layout, or anything else you can think of to use it for. It’s made of the same cardstock-like paper as the Table of Contents in the front.

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Nadia’s notebook had the same green cover as Rachel’s but she loved all of the clear pockets inside this Five Star® Wide Ruled Interactive Notebook. It has two small pockets at the top to hold note-taking supplies, and a larger envelope below for bigger, flat items. She can see all of her supplies laid out right away, and they never get lost in the black hole of backpack pockets.

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Nadia thinks best when she has a lot of white space in her notes, so created this clean, sparse layout for a lesson on the euphemisms in Farewell to Manzanar. She added her own doodles to remind her about the primary source documents we looked at in class.

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All four girls are excellent students, and while they do great work on our online platforms, they enjoy working with pen and paper to process new information. Some of their best connections and epiphanies have come from seeing their notes laid out on the page in a way that they understand. Plus they all enjoy the process of hand writing, and they like looking back at their written notes much better than notes on an online document.

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These are an awesome back to school staple item to add to your list for middle or high school classes. Which one is your favorite?

 

 

how to take notes in college history classes

I have good news for those of you who hate to take notes.

I am a compulsive note-taker, but I have been doing it wrong.  I just completed my ninth year of college (Bachelors + Bible college + teaching credential + Masters) and I have boxes of binders and notebooks full of the copious notes I took for dozens and dozens of courses.  I always think that I’m going to go back and flip through a notebook and find some profound and/or useful nugget of information, but I have yet to do so.  I kind of enjoy taking lecture notes, and it helps me to interact with a text to take notes as I read, but there is a better way.

As far as I know, this will only be useful for history students.  In your upper division courses, you will probably receive a massive required reading list of monographs and articles, and it will be impossible to read every single word and take notes on every single section.  Fortunately, your professors won’t actually expect you to know every minute detail of every text they assign.  There are certain aspects of a text, however, that you will want to make sure you are familiar with.

Oftentimes, my binder full of notes didn’t include these crucial elements.  But this semester I was teaching full time, in grad school, completing a super annoyingly time-consuming aspect of teacher preparation, and teaching music lessons after school.  So I desperately needed a way to streamline my note-taking and reading.  Here is what I started doing:

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You can download this form by clicking the on the file below.  Sorry it looks so small on screen!

Notes

If you are reading a monograph or an article for a discussion course, or even to incorporate into a short paper or book review, one page of notes should be enough.  The important thing is that you are taking purposeful and relevant notes, and those will help you more than my notebooks full of fun facts.

Title & Author: self-explanatory

Argument: If you don’t know what the author’s argument is, no amount of quotes or details is going to help you.  Nail down the main argument.  You will find this in the Introduction.  What is the author trying to prove in this book or article?  If you do understand the argument, you will be able to interact with any other portion of the book.  (Note: This method will only work for a monograph, not for a synthesis. A monograph contains an argument, while a synthesis is just an overall history of a topic.)

Historiography: Historiography is (for lack of a better explanation) the history of the history.  What have other people written about this topic already?  Is your author trying to prove them wrong, or add a missing piece to the story?  Is this a relatively new field of history, such as the importance of animals in combat in WWI?  Or, you might have a fairly old monograph, and you will need to take the timing into consideration.  Is this a book about race, written before the Civil Rights era?  Address any relevant issues in your notes so that they can inform your reading and analysis.

Categories of Analysis: A category of analysis is a lens through which a historian looks at an event.  You might read an article about women during WWII.  The  category of analysis, then, is probably gender.  Other examples of categories of analysis are race, labor, economics, migration, change over time, agriculture, social history, etc.  The categories of analysis are usually related to the argument.  If an author argues that horses were vital to the success of the Comanche tribe against the Spanish, then husbandry is a category of analysis.  Chapter titles are usually your best hint for recognizing categories of analysis.

Methodology: How did this author conduct his or her research, or structure the book?  Sometimes authors will do a comparative study and compare two seemingly different things, and prove that they are similar.  Or an author will do a case study and show how an individual story can shed light on an entire event/ situation.  Oftentimes the author will explain the methodology explicitly in the Introduction.

Evidence: What did the author use to prove his or her argument?  Census records, diaries, presidential speeches?  The evidence usually consists of primary source documents.  You can be critical of the evidence, too.  Did the author use enough sources?  Were these sources credible?  If you are writing a book review, you will definitely want to be mindful of the evidence the author chose to include.

Other notes: Here is where I get to indulge in a little trivia gathering, or jot down interesting quotes.  I can’t just quit cold turkey!

Side note: This is a great way to outline your own papers as well.  When you don’t have these elements worked out, you tend to have writer’s block at 3:00am the night before the paper is due.

Here is an example of some of my notes from last semester…

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My professor specifically only wanted one page of notes for two articles, so I had to adjust my format a little.  But with just half a page of notes per article, I was able to fully engage in classroom discussion and I had a clear understanding of the material.

Let me know if this is useful! 🙂