Friday, April 3, 2020

Going Digital With Interactive Notebooks


I used Interactive Notebooks for years in my classroom.  I love the idea of Interactive Notebooks.  I think it is vital to teach students to save important information as they are learning.  I used Interactive Notebooks as a hands-on approach to notetaking, providing my students with a go-to place to house their learning.  I use to call ours, "Our Scholar Book of Knowledge."  Interactive Notebooks have many benefits, but after a while, I became frustrated with some of the aspects of routinely using them in the classroom.  First, I grew to hate having students cut and glue things in their spiral notebooks.  It took forever, and my room always looked like a herd of hampsters had overtaken it.  Oh, the paper!  The tiny bits of paper all over everything...


AND, the glue!!  For goodness sakes, you would think that middle school students would have mastered this skill!

Even when no cutting or gluing was involved, our notebooks took time.  They took time to find them, to write notes and to organize.  I had other problems too.  Students would lose them and there was no way to make up a semesters worth of notes.  Even student absences were an issue.  I would have to help them fill in their missing sections.  I was ready to bail on the notebooks.  I needed a change.


A coworker and I decided that we would go digital with our notebooks.  We needed a platform and we decided to use Google Slides.  Slides are great for presentations, but also make magnificent platforms for digital learning.  I had already used slides for interactive lessons and digital scavenger hunts, but we decided to take digital learning with Google Slides to the NEXT LEVEL.  Going Digital with my Interactive Notebooks has fundamentally changed my teaching.



I have used Interactive Digital Notebooks or IDNs in my classroom for 7 months now.  The benefits of going digital with my notebooks will require more than a single post.  It has been a remarkable experience.  In future posts, I will provide practical advice for getting started, as well as tips I have learned along the way, but for now, let me share some of the benefits I found.


  1. Going digital saves paper.  I spend a lot less time at the copier AND I'm killing way fewer trees.
  2. Students cannot lose Digital Notebooks!  My students' notebooks are always safely located in their Google Drives.
  3. Students can always access their notebooks.  As long as my students have an internet connection, they can access their Digital Interactive Notebooks from anywhere.  They can even access their notebooks on their phones!
  4. If a student is absent, I can post my presentation notes on Google Classroom and catch them up, easy-peasy.
  5. Because I share our notebooks with my students through Google Classroom, I can see their notebooks at any time, and anywhere.  No more notebooks piled up on my desk waiting for me to grade.  
  6. Digital Notebooks are interactive in a way that paper notebooks can never be.  I can provide students to links to websites and I can embed videos.  I can have them write in notes or annotate a reading selection.  They can compose a written response or they can simply interact with a slide by moving things around to demonstrate and/or build their learning.  The possibilities are truly endless and I can't wait to share them!



Contact me by email at teacherdigitaltrends@gmail.com
Twitter at https://twitter.com/BGoogley
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22 comments:

  1. Do you have an example you can share with us? My only problem with these is how do you grade 160+ notebooks. This is why I gave up on interactive notebooks years ago. There are so many pros that I would like to try again if I can wrap my brain around the grading.

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    1. Visit my March post. I have several page examples there. :)

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  2. How do you add pages to the notebook? That is the biggest concern I have. Do I need to create the ENTIRE notebook at one time?

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    Replies
    1. Hey Kim! Are we connected on the Be Googley Facebook group? I posted a how-to for this question. :)

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  3. I have thought about going digital with my INB due to hybrid model next school year. However, I can’t really envision what this would look like. Do you have any pics to share?

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    Replies
    1. Visit my March post. There are several page samples there. :)

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  4. Visit my March post. There are several page samples there. :)

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    1. I would suggest that when you point people to other posts of yours, you include a link in your reply. I'm sure there's good information there, but readers are a lot less likely to try to go find it than they are to just click on a link. All the best to you! John

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  5. You could have a link on their covers to a view only master and every time you want them to add a slide or reflection question, they can easily copy/paste. Unfortunately none of the special add ons for inserting slides are available in my district.

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    Replies
    1. You could, but I don't have to have them add slides very often.

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