This is one of the most practical digital recommendations I have for upper-division students or those of us who take notes from presentations. SoundNote simultaneously records audio content and allows the user to generate notes (with simple images). The advantage of this simultaneous recording of the sound and the notes is the later opportunity to use the sound when the notes taken prove inadequate. What do you as a student do when the notes you took no longer made sense? Click on the note that makes no sense and listen to the associated audio again.
This is my answer to those who want to argue that taking notes longhand is superior to using a laptop/tablet.
This citation has been circulated widely in the past week:
Urry, H. L., Crittle, C. S., Floerke, V. A., Leonard, M. Z., Perry III, C. S., Akdilek, N., … & Zarrow, J. E. (2019). Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies. Psychological Science, 0956797620965541.
You get the idea from the title. The replication of a previous study showing that taking notes with pencil and notebook is not superior to taking notes using your laptop. This study challenged the results of an earlier study that was often cited by using a notebook and pencil while taking notes.
OK – it is now OK for tech folks to argue students can use their laptops during class to take notes.
I am not impressed by either study for this reason. Neither study offers a good model for note-taking as the first step in studying which is really what students are doing when taking notes.
Here is a key couple of sentences from the Abstract that explain the method used in this research:
participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop (n = 74) or longhand (n = 68). After a brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a quiz
This is really a method that would be appropriate to the generative function of taking notes. Do you understand better while taking notes and in this case do you understand better when taking notes longhand versus using a laptop. The results do not indicate that it matters, but this is not why you take notes anyway. You don’t take notes and then take a test. You take notes over a period of time, study your notes, and then take a test. The delay and the amount of material are the reality faced by students.
My recommendation goes further and involves a combination of recording and note-taking only available on a digital device (see my description of SoundNote). This app allows the taking of notes, but records the audio in the background and time stamps each note to a location in the audio. This combination makes it easy to listen to sections of the audio when the notes that exist are not adequate. This would work would also benefit from the research finding that laptop users take more notes.
I started my hydroponic garden in early December and decided it was time for an update. The garden is 96 days old and just starting to provide cherry tomatoes. We have been eating the lettuce for some time now and I decided it was time to replant the side of the garden dedicated to lettuce. I am preparing my own lettuce “plugs” this time as I continue to experiment with modifying various components of the stock system. I decided I will keep a tally of the number of cherry tomatoes I harvest and I added a meter to measure the amount of power consumed. I am not under an impression that growing your own vegetables indoors is cost-effective, but some estimate of the on-going cost would be interesting.
The following images show the lettuce/herb side of the garden before replacement, the new setup, and the first cherry tomatoes.
Educators may want to assign a collection of YouTube videos to students for a project or study assignment. This tutorial will explain how this is done and relies mostly on a series of images.
I see this process in three stages – create a playlist, add videos to the playlist, share the playlist with a specific audience. The process works a little differently depending on whether you want to use videos you have created or videos created by others.
Stages 1 and 2 using videos created by others.
Beneath a video from another source, you will find this save icon. The save icon brings up the option of adding to an existing playlist or creating a new playlist. You would first create a new playlist with a video you wanted to use and then continue to add additional videos. The order of selection can be modified at a later stage so you don’t have to worry about the order when first creating the list.
Working with your own videos or a mix of content from your own creations and existing videos seems to work a little differently. To create the list and add your own creations, work through the YouTube Studio.
Within the Studio, you can then identify a video you have created to be added, open the video as if to edit, and then use the playlist feature to add to an existing playlist.
The final step is to share the list with students. Note in this image the share button (left) and the list of selected videos on the right. A key feature of this list of videos is the opportunity to reorder the videos. You drag the video with the small parallel lines icon to change the position. The share icon offers the opportunity to share to various outlets or allows the copying of the URL for sharing with specific individuals.
A sample playlist focused on my own efforts to explain Layering services was created using this process.
We have learned that social media can be very inappropriate. While the promise of interaction for greater understanding is certainly there, the negativity of such interaction seems to have destroyed this opportunity leading to the expectations of many that political pressure must be put on social media services.
There may be an alternative. The idea of middleware proposes that a technology fix can be positioned between the user and the service. This concept is explained in this article from the Wall Street Journal. While the article describes the potential and approach in some depth, it lacks specific examples.
Work is underway on at least one approach. Jigsaw, a group associated with Google, has been working on the development of Perspective which proposes the use of AI to develop an API to screen comments before they are sent or before they are read. The link provides an explanation and an opportunity to test a comment you might send. Research has demonstrated that users will often make modifications in reaction to what are called nudges. The proposal is that such technology could be incorporated by social services, but also function as middleware.
While this technology exists and is being refined, you can already use a version of what is now available. Tune is a chrome extension you can add to screen comments you would be exposed to through several social media platforms.
Toxicity middleware may be coming to school technology equipment in the near future.
This has been a very different winter for us. Since retirement, we have traveled during the worst months of the Minnesota winter and that is not possible this year. Temperatures that have reached -20+ this past week have eliminated most of our outdoor activity and being confined to the house gets old very quickly. I have decided to think warm even if I can’t experience warm.
In the summer of 2019, we were able to travel to southern Africa and among all of our opportunities to travel this had to be the most unique. We were familiar with the political history of South Africa because we have a good friend from there we have known for years. I have long been a fan of the music and incorporate the unique sounds into my regular playlists. Being there was all that we had imagined and more.
One of the things we did for ourselves and for others was to share some of the stories and pictures. On this cold day in Minnesota, I decided I would offer access to my annotated collection of African wildlife. I created a free to use collection of images as a Flickr album. The images are identified and a link to Wikipedia or some other source is provided for each image should you or a student additional information.
I have not generated a post about layering for some time. I found a description of DocDrop and thought it provided a great example of how the concept of layering could be applied to the study of video.
DocDrop is a service that allows the simultaneous display of a YouTube video and the associated text normally displayed as closed captions.
This dual display alone may have value, but it is the integration of DocDrop and Hypothes.is that offers the opportunity for educators and learners I see as having the greatest potential. Hypothes.is was the first layering system I explored and the first I used in a class. It allows the personal or collaborative annotation (highlighting, notes) of text content. I see the value here as a way to improve the processing of text for learning and retention.
Now, the following is a demonstration of the possibility of combining of DocDrop and Hypothes.is.
If this video interests you, I was not focused in the demo on explaining Hypothes.is. The following video was generated a couple of years ago to explain the use of Hypothes.is.
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