Do you have your students annotate their readings? I was frustrated by their randomness and lack of connection to previous work or knowledge. I will share my assignments from this week where I hope they improve their note-taking.

Here's my assignment for the French Revolution notes.  Here's my rubric.  Here's an example I provide them with--keep in mind this is my on-level WH class which includes some EL students so I tend to provide an easy entry example.

One more activity that ties to this is the always fun storyboard.

Lisa Meyers   This is something I'm trying to work on with my students as well in 9th grade.  I upload a reading and have them annotate with the Kami app (embedded with Google Classroom).  I also use these simple instructions and rubric to help them along, and then I also provide an exemplar or will model it in class with a short reading. 

Active Reading

Great question - yes, we annotate, but I try to change up the style often.  Last week while reading the Unit 1 Introduction article from the 1750 course, I asked them to highlight and annotate very specific things. 

Here's a sample of my Slide instructions.  In this case I was looking to assess and reinforce their understanding of scale, ccot, and comparison - the things I had introduced the week before.

I find that when I leave the instructions looser they just highlight and underline everything and they don't know why they are doing it.  

stealing this!! great share, thank you!

Angela Lee Do your students have Chromebooks? I love this idea of utilizing Kami, but am worried they won't have the ability to annotate legibly using the trackpad on the Chromebook.

 Julianne Horowitz I LOVE your slide!! I struggle to put presentations together in a way that captures their attention while also presenting the necessary information.

They are actually not - most of them use Macbook Airs, and we are 1-to-1 BYOD.  I'm not sure why the trackpads on Chromebooks are so terrible, but I can see your concern using Kami.  However, Kami also includes typing text, or just highlighting (straight, not freehand), so that might mitigate the issue. 

Great instruction for the specific topics & trends to look for. I find that many of my students have the same challenge: highlighting everything and not making those deeper connections.  Great suggestion, Julianne Horowitz 

To help my students, I often give them a question that they should be annotating evidence in the reading to answer. This gives them some direction on what is important in the document. It also doesn't take a lot of prep time to get ready which is nice.