A little while back I did a review of Easybib as an assignment for one of my courses. It’s a tool we recommend to our students. For a while I was impressed by it’s notetaking tool and I’ve tried using it a few times because it kind of makes intuitive sense. But it just doesn’t work for me. And I’m beginning to realise why…. read more
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 
Nadine, I really enjoyed reading your post. I, too, have transformed my learning since my last Masters.
I made a definitive decision to only work online in the spirit of keeping my work in the digital realm. Evernote captured my interest after attending a webinar given by Jessica Jorna, a forward thinking and inspiring teacher at a Sydney school. She has wholeheartedly embraced working with her students in a collaborating manner online, and apart from Google Apps, used Evernote extensively in her professional and private life.
It has been difficult for me to do as you have done and shifted from notes scribbled, Post-It noted, and highlighted. But now I’ve become confident that I can still do all of this and more – categories, tags, collecting websites and dragging them into Evernote so everything is in one spot!
It has provided me with a rich tapestry of others’ academic authority, random readings of interest, and my own thoughts to draw on for assignments that are so easily searchable. Life as a student has become so much easier! Totally agree with you that we should share this with our own students to expand their arsenal of critical thinking tools to allow them to move further along the track of REALLY expressing their own ideas.
To end, after announcing so proudly that I have embraced the totally digital in both my CSU study and CSU marking, I will quietly admit to a guilty secret…I still have to have a printed hard copy of my subject outline available on my desk each session. 🙂
LikeLike
Funnily enough, my subject outline and the modules are all I print as well, I summarise my notes on the back / opposite sides of where the listing appears in the modules!
Did you like the reading: “are you teaching content or are you teaching thought?” (http://www.teachthought.com/learning/teaching-content-or-teaching-thought/).
I’m really wondering if the way we teach and assess students affects how much they think thought or just summarising content is sufficient. i.e. they will live up to our high or low expectations and the way in which we scaffold their learning. Do we make assumptions about how much original thought they are capable and limit them by those assumptions?
LikeLike