Second VDWC Session: It’s the Process, Not the Product

Summary of  "It's the Process, Not the Product:  Improving Student Research with Digital Organization 

Rachelle Wynkoop presented a webinar on improving student research with digital organization, focusing on the process of research rather than the product.  She interacts effectively with the live participants to tailor the content to her audience, and she provides some modeling and practice with a sample essay to guide participants through the process of summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting from research.  She suggests that we always explain to students why they are using research.  Specifically, she suggests that we teach students that documenting our sources is a tool we can use as writers to go back to the research so we can clarify our writing.  She argues that this explanation will be more meaningful to students than explaining that students must give credit to the original thinkers, because students are so used to the sharing, participatory nature of the web.

                The second part of Wynkoop’s presentation focuses on actually creating digital notecards, and she lists several drawbacks of analog notecards that can be lost or become unwieldy.  She suggests using Google Slides to create digital notecards, especially since many schools and students already have accounts set up.  She shows some screenshots of how to use the Research tool within Slides to conduct research, and also how to use Revision History to show students how they can demonstrate accountability, especially if there is collaboration among students.  Live participants than joined in a shared Google Slides deck to demonstrate the features, including creating a format for each kind of slide and also creating a graphic organizer.  In the archive of this presentation, the links to the slide deck were in the chat, which was inaccessible, so that was a limitation.

Personal reflections

I absolutely see the value of generating and storing notes digitally.  As Wynkoop mentions, some students will lose their paper-and-pencil notes, or forget to bring them to class.  It has also been my experience that students who record notes on paper often forget to accurately document which source they are using for the information, or they will jumble up information from multiple sources onto one notecard about a topic.  Providing students with a sample slide deck that they can copy and add to with their own research would be so beneficial for students who require tangible examples and formats to guide their work.

Impact for teaching and students

Wynkoop presents a tool that will be valuable for a wide variety of teachers and students, and she effectively explains the logic for scaffolding research assignments as well as moving the research to a digital platform.  She mentions that a number of other tools could perform similar tasks, including Word/Powerpoint, Evernote, Citelighter and Noodletools.  For teachers and students that aren’t using Google Classroom, these would be worth exploring.  I’ll make a plug for Noodletools, which is a subscription-based product I have used extensively with students.  It is a citation generator that can be used for MLA, APA and other styles, and it allows for digital notecards that look like this: 

It provides helpful hints throughout the process and can be customized by audience, offering fewer or more choices in pull-down menus so that younger students won’t be overwhelmed and more sophisticated researchers can document everything they find.

Overall, the title of this session is an important reminder for all teachers that no matter what tools we use, we must spend valuable class time and instruction on teaching the research process, and not just assigning it and looking at the final product.