In my last post about reinventing science notebooks, I described my summer project to introduce digital versions of the traditional science notebook with my students next fall. Before I get into the nitty gritty techie side of how to do this, I’d like to state my goals for these digital science notebooks. Although I’m currently leaning toward a Google Apps/Google Sites combination for these digital notebooks, I’m not wedding to any technology in particular, and if anyone out there has a better idea for what tool could accomplish these goals, I’m all ears! So here goes:
#1: Help students stay organized, easily
Middle School students are notoriously bad at organization, so I’m looking for a solution that will make it easy for students keep assorted types of documents organized. Just like a 3-ring binder could have sections for homework, notes, lab work, project research, I want their digital notebooks to keep things orderly, well labeled, and chronological. Unlike a 3-ring binder I don’t want students to waste a lot of time hole-punching, sorting, and still ultimately misplacing their documents!
#2: Share students’ learning like a portfolio
We do student led conferences at my school, and it’s a powerful experience for students to share their learning and reflect about their learning with their parents. The past few years we’ve had students set up an “e-Portfolio” using a GoogleSite, so they can put all of their evidence and reflections in one place, but this is a time-consuming task. As long as it is set up in an attractive, reflective way, a digital notebook could double as an e-portfolio.
#3: Enable and encourage collaborative learning
Most science classrooms are naturally collaborative, but the collaboration doesn’t need to end at the lab table. Tools such as Google Docs make it easy for students to share work and ideas with others, as well as comment and build on each others ideas. A good digital notebook should allow for different types of collaboration (peer, small group, whole class) as well as allow for some documents to be private when collaboration isn’t appropriate.
#4: Connect students with learning resources
This is something that can really set digital notebooks apart from their papery counterparts: the ability to link up students with learning resources that can help them either review or extend their learning. Imagine a student finishes up a lab on the properties of solids and liquids, but they’ve still got some questions the lab activity didn’t answer. A digital notebook could allow the teacher to provide links to different online resources for the student to explore further. There could be links to similar content for the struggling student to review as well as links to new material to challenge those students that are ready to move on.
#5: Give students more feedback about their learning
This last goal might be the most challenging but also the most important. With traditional science notebooks the teacher could periodically collect the notebooks and write feedback to students, but we teachers know how time-consuming that is. I began this past year with a goal of giving more formative assessment-type feedback to my students, but it became challenging to keep up with the pace. The more immediate feedback is, the greater the impact it will have on student learning, so a good digital notebook could help provide additional opportunities for learning feedback, as well a keeping a record of their progress. I’m imagining a kind of “learning dashboard” for each student that would keep track of all their learning progress from many types of feedback: graded teacher feedback, practice quizes results, self-reflections. I’m not the first person to think of this (Kahn Academy has a “gameified” learning dashboard, and my school is currently creating one a school-wide one), but I’ve yet to see something that takes advantage of teacher’s online gradebooks and feedback and create a student-friendly summary of their learning progress.
So there you have it. I know it’s an ambitious list, but I think there is a ton of potential in education technology tools that are currently being way under-utilized. Hopefully with the help of like-minded teachers out there, we can move science notebooking into the 21st century where it belongs! 🙂
How is it going? I am doing a similar conversion at Singapore American School. I am excited about the potential of the digital classroom, but I am still see the value of physical manipulation and representation of their learning on paper (drawing sketches, margin notes, etc). The paper science notebook remains the gold standard in research, as well. So I am stuck…I am not sure if I should still use paper science notebooks for some things and have use their laptop for others. I would like to give them exemplars for how to organize labs, notes, assessments, etc in a way that allows them to cross between assignments and connect between the different activities, but I am not sure what the best bet is. Thoughts?
Hi Kattina- good to hear from you. I know a few teachers from Doha that are working in Singapore now- I think at your school. Do you know the Ossmans?
I hear you about the value of paper for some purposes, especially sketching, and I think in some cases I may have my students use paper first and then scan/photograph to add it to the digital notebook. But I think I will use digital media as much as possible to simplify things. Using the digital notebook should also make it easy to use exemplars as well- since you can easily share teacher-created exemplars and good student exemplars as well. This year I think I will create an example digital notebook along with the students to model the expectations for them.
I’ll post soon about the nitty gritty of how I’m setting up the notebooks on Google Sites and Docs, but thanks for bringing up the idea of exemplars- I’ll keep that in mind!
[…] Digital Science Notebook Goals […]
[…] is start sharing my thoughts on how the digital science notebooks worked (especially in light of my goals from the beginning of the year), and how I’m planning on improving them for next year. There’s a lot to reflect on, so […]
Howdy! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a team of volunteers and starting a new initiative in a community in the same
niche. Your blog provided us valuable information to work on. You have done a marvellous job!
Glad to hear it!
[…] goal of mine with digital notebooks was to enable new forms of collaboration in my classroom. Because digital […]
Hi. I am a virtual school teacher with 647 science students. ~Half are 6th and the other half are 8th graders. I am really interested developing online science notebooks but I would like the capability to build it per unit and then “pass it out” for students to work in as we complete assignments. I would like this to be a custom assessment tool. Do you think that something like your idea here could work? Do all of the students have to have Google accounts for this to work?
Hi Chrissy,
You could set up a separate site for each unit, but if you know the units in advance you can set it up as I have and then just share out the docs as you go. That’s how I do it as well. I use Hapara to share the documents out, but if your school doesn’t have that you could check out Doctopus or Google Classroom which are both free. Students will need Google accounts for this to work though, since the sites are hosted by Google.