Category: Digital notes

Tools that allow the personal annotation, storage, and search of content as a component of personal productivity or study.

Notion – collect, organize, annotate, and share

Over the past few years, I have tried several different online tools to support my blogging and other writing tasks. Especially for blogging, I now pay for a subscription to Evernote. I have also tried OneNote, Google Keep, and Zoho Notebook. I find Evernote perfectly suited to what I do and find the subscription price reasonable. My subscription price is $43 a year at least according to the feature within iOS that keeps track of my subscriptions and what each costs. As I will explain in a bit, this amount is kind of confusing as the public subscription price seems to be $8 a month and I am not sure if I have an educator’s discount or am grandfathered in. I pay through Apple, but I doubt that would give me a lower rate.

I do keep track of similar services as a way to communicate to educators just what options are available within what I think of as a category of services – those allowing collection, organization, and annotation. I assume most educators have a need to collect online resources to support their instruction. Occasionally, this could also involve sharing resources with students and it would be nice if the same service could support both tasks.

I have been exploring the free level of Notion. To simply my explanation, I will outline one process for using Notion in this way and then explain some of the steps in greater detail. Notion is very flexible and this is just one simple strategy for how it might be used.

The process.

  1. Create an account
  2. Add the web clipper if working from a desktop machine. Set up sharing if working on a phone or tablet. With iOS this just means you activate the setting associated with sharing that allows the connection to the Notion app.
  3. Create a page in Notion
  4. Use the clipper or the app sharing technique to bring a page into the page you have created (think of this as a sub-page)
  5. Highlight content imported if desired
  6. Turn on sharing for a page and set desired permissions. Copy the share link and send it to those you want to provide access

This image shows what Notion might look like after you have it set up and have been using it. Several things can be noted here. You can see two panels – the panel of the left shows existing pages and allows them to be moved about and embedded within other pages. I have used a red box to highlight several pages I have collected in preparation to describe Notion. One of these pages appears in the larger panel. You would highlight and read the content in the larger panel.

At the bottom of the left-hand panel you see a button for creating a new page (red box at bottom). This would be the button used if you wanted to first create a page within which other pages would appear.

At the top of this image, you see the “share” button within a red box.

Content from other web sites is moved into Notion in different ways depending on whether you are working on a laptop or a mobile device. On a laptop, you will need to add the Notion extension to the Chrome browser. Only Chrome is supported as of this date. When the extension is added, the Notion icon appears in the browser menubar. You select this icon when you are browsing a web page you want to copy to Notion. A dropdown box will appear (see image) and you select the page on Notion within which you want to add the new content. On a mobile device (at least iOS devices), you use a browser to find the content you want to store and then use the share icon to share to the Notion app. On iOS, you must first add Notion to the share options iOS will access.

This image shows the share options within Notion (see first image to see the positioning of this icon). When the share icon is selected, you get this dropdown window for the to be shared page. You can set permissions from this window and also get the link to provide others access.

If you are interested, here is a link for a page I have shared publically.

https://www.notion.so/grabe/Notion-info-page2a557aa589a84824bc7c5859b8b36c49

Loading

Keep it in Keep (iPad)

Google Keep offers an efficient and free way to archive content as you spend time on the Internet. I have described this service before, but did not offer an explanation of how it works on different devices. This post deals specifically with the iPad.

If you have Keep on your iPad, sending content to your Keep archive makes use of the “share” feature. The one tricky thing about sharing on the iPad is that you must activate “share” for specific apps. Here is the process.

The share icon (top red box) opens a display of the options. At the right-hand end of the existing options, a series of three dots (see red box) offers the opportunity to activate other share possibilities.

The three dot icon opens up the apps that can be coordinated with the active app. You use the slider associated with a given app to make it available. Once activated, this app will be available as an outlet for selected content when the share option is used.

Loading

Teach highlighting and notetaking skills

Technology offers learners some study skill opportunities often not available until recently. A vast literature investigating highlighting and notetaking exists, but few K-12 educators have been trained to help their students learn to use these study skills effectively. While some may offer advice on taking notes, highlighting has been largely ignored because marking up content intended to be used in the future by other students was forbidden. The use of digital content eliminates this problem, but the opportunities of this content in digital form have been largely ignored.

My own familiarity with highlighting and notetaking go back to the late 1970s and 1980s. It is my impression that these study strategies were heavily investigated during that time frame because of the interest in generative strategies. Interest seemed to wane, but I sense a return of some of these ideas.

I recommend two recent sources:

Miyatsu, Toshiya, Khuyen Nguyen, and Mark A. McDaniel. (2018). Five Popular Study Strategies: Their Pitfalls and Optimal Implementations. Perspectives on Psychological Science 13, 3, 390-407.

Surma, T., Camp, G. & Kirschner, P. (translated) Less is more: Highlighting as learning strategy. [https://3starlearningexperiences.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/less-is-more-highlighting-as-learning-strategy/]

Miyatsu and colleagues make an interesting point about study strategy research. They suggest that researchers have focused on developing new study techniques, but these techniques have been largely ignored. Miyatsu recommends that greater attention be focused on study strategies that are used and how these strategies might be optimized.

Highlighting and annotating (simplified notetaking) fit well with my interest in opportunities for the application of online layering opportunities.

Here is a quick perspective on the highlighting and notetaking research.

The potential benefits of both techniques are approached as potentially resulting from generative processing (activities while reading/listening) and external storage (improvement of review or studying). Of course, these are interrelated as better highlighting and notetaking should improve later review (I will make one comment on whether this relationship still holds at a later point). A quick summary might be that a) the benefit of notetaking appears to be in review and b) the benefit of highlighting appears to be in the generative act of highlighting. I cannot offer an explanation of why these strategies appear to work in different ways. 

One further comment related to my reference to layering is that highlighting and notetaking can be provided rather than generated by students. Providing highlights and annotations can benefit review and may be a way to teach a better generative approach. One of the findings of these more recent reviews of the literature is that K-12 students do not benefit from highlighting opportunities while college students do. This could be because younger students have not practiced this technique and when provided the opportunity do not highlight in an effective way. They do benefit when important content is highlighted for them.

With notetaking more generative strategies (paraphrasing vs verbatim) improves the benefits of the note taking process, but verbatim notes are more effective for external storage (review). I think this could possibly be improved by use of apps that allow notetaking while recording presentations. The notes taken within such apps are timestamped allowing review of the original recorded content when the notes seem confusing. Students using this approach could also just enter a marker, eg., ???, in notes when confused rather than overload working memory and use this marker to return to the spot in the recorded notes for more careful thought when studying. The notes could even be improved later using this same approach. 

If you don’t have access to a college library, you may be unable to read the Myatsu paper, but the second reference is online and offers some useful analysis.

Loading

Something new in research on note taking

Others often put down the lecture approach, but it is an efficient way to get information to large numbers of learners. Adopting this method is not intended as a comment on what is necessary for students to understand and learn this content any more than those of us who write are making a statement about what learners should do once they have received written information. Some of us think very seriously about what learning is and what the learner must do to learn. Presenters and writers should see their role as providing an input to one of many processes learners must apply to learn.

During a written or oral presentation learners can simply take in information and think about what they have received or they can apply external activities such as note taking (or highlighting) to actively work with this information. Such external activities have been investigated by researchers to determine how use of a process like note taking varies with differences in learner background and aptitude and if learners who take notes can be shown ways to improve the effectiveness of the process. This post deals specifically with note taking.

The traditional method of analyzing note taking involved recognizing two interrelated processes – note taking and note using. Researchers proposed that taking notes even without review could be beneficial. Taking notes maintained attention and it could involve what might be called paraphrasing as a way to require active interpretation. Some learners were better at note taking than others. For example, the notes taken differed in whether they contained important ideas from the presentation and whether these ideas appeared in notes predicted later performance. Some effort has been devoted to why these initial differences in what was recorded existed. Of course, if key ideas are not present in notes it is difficult to review/study these notes at a later point in time.

I don’t intend to spend a lot more time reviewing some of the research on note taking as the point of this post is to examine an updated model I just read. If you are interested in the research on note taking, I would propose that you read the paper outlining this newer model as it does a good job of outlining previous thinking about the subject. A citation for this article is included at the conclusion of this post.

What the new model proposes is that the use of notes might be better understood as having three components – note taking, note revision, and note review/study. The authors propose a couple of ways in which learners might revize notes – being allowed to look over their notes during planned pauses during the presentation and after examining. The study did demonstrate that these inserted opportunities for revision were beneficial to the learners.

I have doubts concerning whether those of us who lectured to large groups would cut out presentation time by say 15 minutes out of a standard 50 minute presentation. However, there may be other ways to implement a productive revision process. One technique not mentioned by the authors in their review was the use of technology to simultaneously record the lecture while taking notes. There are apps for that. The app I have used for several years is SoundNote – https://soundnote.com/. The automatic time stamping of the notes to the audio allows a convenient way to review the audio when the notes are confusing or even when a message inserted into the notes indicate that the learner knew he/she missed something. A learner might simply use some like a double question mark (??) when he or she knows an important, but poorly understood idea had been presented. This app may offer a more practical way to offer review and may be a more practical way to implement a revision process as a precise link to the original content is possible.

If the topic of note-taking is of interest, this paper does a nice job of reviewing the literature. They also cited me so, of course, I am a fan. I often write about how technology allows practical ways to actually implement ideas surfaced in research years ago and I think an argument can be made that this is the case with note taking and studying from notes.

So here is what I think is a basic question. Who informs college students using tools of this type can be very helpful?

Luo, L., Kiewra, K. A., & Samuelson, L. (2016). Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement. Instructional Science, 44(1), 45-67.

Loading