Classroom Strategies that Work for a 21st Century Classroom Pt. 2

Johan Larsson flickr 

The strategy that I want to focus on in this post is Summarizing and Note Taking, another of Marzano's high yield strategies. As teachers, we work to enhance the students' ability to synthesize information and then distill it into a concise form. This process brings in the higher order thinking skills of analyzing the information to determine key concepts and deleting the extraneous material. Note taking is related as students take notes by writing down every word or phrase. To be successful note takers, students must summarize the information to get the meaning which leads to greater understanding of the content. Again, note taking is a skill that students must be taught.

There are many tech tools which can be utilized as you teach and students use this strategy.

Google Docs - A collaborative platform in which students can work together to takes notes and summarize key ideas. Our school system is moving forward with Google Apps for Education which will include student accounts by 2013.

Wikis - are a collaborative website allowing users to add, modify, and delete content online. Our school system uses Wikispaces.com for our wikis, but you can also utilize Google Sites or PB Wiki. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.

Evernote - This is quite possibly my favorite tool. Evernote works on computers, phones, and tablets and allows you to create and organize documents, pictures, lists, and more. You have the option to add recordings right into the notes as well as photos. Its optical character recognition ability allows you to search via keywords pictures that contain text. I love the fact that you can create notebooks to house your notes and share with others, all in the cloud. Truly, anytime, anywhere access.

Twitter - Utilizing the platform of 140 characters, challenge your students to create summarizes that are Twitter friendly. You don't even have to have a Twitter account. While perusing Pinterest, we found an idea from a teacher who is using sentence strips as "tweets" for exit slips. What a great display idea while telling others what your students are learning. You could also use a class Twitter account to create tweets to your parents about what students did in school that day.  This would be a great end of day closing activity where you write the tweet together and then you post as the teacher.