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Improve students’ note-taking skills, whilst actively engaging them through collaborative learning. Students can use the notes as resources for assessments. You can also share the notes with future students to encourage collaborative note-taking and sharing knowledge amongst themselves.
How to do this
- Set up the collaborative document for students to take notes in, which could be an online Word document or Canvas page.
- Divide students into small groups. Groups should consist of three to four students to increase opportunities for learning from each other’s note-taking skills. You can assign students to random groups using Canvas.
- Ask students to take notes collaboratively while you are delivering your first lecture.
- Look through the notes during or after the lecture, depending on its duration, and ask students to discuss their notes. You could ask some of the following questions to get students talking:
- Why did you think of it that way?
- What made you think it is an important point?
- Would you like to tell us more about your point?
- Ask students to comment on each other’s notes and encourage them to ask questions or clarify orally in groups.
- Repeat in your following lectures to establish as standard practice, and engage students to collaborate throughout the session.
You can review what students have written and ask them to make amendments if needed. This makes the notes useful for students to use for assessments. You can also share these notes with future students as part of your lesson preparation.
Guide your students to the UTS effective notetaking page if they need more general tips on taking notes for study.
What tools can you use?
The following technologies in this activity are supported by UTS:
If you would like to experiment, try the following tools (please note, it is not officially supported by UTS):
When and where to use
This activity is suitable to introduce at the beginning of the session for the following classes:
- Blended Learning
- Block mode
- Large cohorts
- Group work
How long will it take?
| BUILD | TEACH | LEARN |
|---|---|---|
| 20 mins | 10 mins | 30 mins |
What research tells us
Collaborative note-taking is a great strategy to involve students in a lecture, if that is your chosen method of delivery or a classroom strategy that you employ the most. There is evidence that small groups taking notes collaboratively perform better than individuals, and that collaborative note-taking contributes to a better learning outcome (Orndorff 2015). Orndorff suggests that when students split up note-taking with a group, each individual will have more time to think deeply about the material presented. While the finding of a single study may not be conclusive, the study demonstrates that, if used effectively, collaborative note-taking can be a useful strategy to support learning from lectures and presentations.
References
Orndorff III, H. N. (2015). Collaborative note-taking: the impact of cloud computing on classroom performance. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 27(3), 340-351.
Citation and attribution
Laudari, S. (2019). ‘Collaborative note-taking’ in Adaptable Resources for Teaching with Technology, LX.Lab, Institute for Interactive Media & Learning, University of Technology, Sydney. Retrieved from lx-uat.uts.edu.au/resources/collaborative-notetaking
The Adaptable Resources for Teaching with Technology collection by LX.Lab, Institute for Interactive Media & Learning, University of Technology, Sydney are provided as open educational resources under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
