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.
