Summarizing+&+Note+taking

Read and Reflect It amazes me that so many of our students truly struggle with summarizing and note taking. Students often come to me for tutoring, and when I ask to see their notes it is very apparent that their skills in the areas of summarizing and note taking often leave much to be desired. Especially our students with learning disabilities, as well as general education students often try to write down everything they hear. Or if we give them a selection to highlight important information, they will highlight the ENTIRE page, or NOTHING at all. I also see many students who cannot pick out the essential information from a paragraph. We, as educators, expect our students to be able to take notes and summarize information they are presented with, but the reality is that this is a true area of weakness for many of our students. We need to take the time to teach our kids strategies to improve their note taking skills, whether that be using diagrams, or guided note taking. My role is a little different in that I am not a classroom teacher, but a special education coteacher. I like to take the material that students are going to take notes over and create guided notes for students to fill in the important missing pieces. This keeps students on-task and helps to keep some from feeling over-whelmed. At this point in time I am not using technology to assist students with summarizing and note taking. Apply and Reflect The Compelling Photos from 2009 link says "Sorry, this VoiceThread has been deleted by its creator". I created a voice thread, and can see how this could be a very useful tool. I feel like I need more practice and expierience with it before I could use it to effectively assist students with note taking or summarizing information. My account only shows that I could use my cell phone to record for 3 minutes on my account, which means I would constantly be deleting and replacing my voicethreads. The address is: [] for some reason it was not appearing when I click on "Save" [|VoiceThread Link to Ms. Proctor's Sample]

Link does not appear after I click "save"... address is []

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In working on the next lesson using Google Docs, I love the idea of having students use this tool to be able to finish working on notes or things at home, rather than emailing them to themselves.