Setting Up Digital Interactive Notebooks

Thinking about going digital with your interactive notebooks?  Oh, where to begin?  I started with my curriculum and what I am required to teach each grading period.   Then, I decided to use Google Slides as my platform for creating my Digital Interactive Notebooks or DINs.  Google Slides are great for presentations, but Slides can also be an amazing platform for both teaching and student learning.  Slides allow for the embedding of links and video.  Content can also include text and pictures which can be manipulated and/or moved around to demonstrate learning.  Slides also feature the amazing Explore Tool which provides students with a controlled, safe resource for research, embedding their own pictures, etc.  The possibilities are just endless and I think, even after a year, that I have just scratched the surface of what I can do with slides!


I decided early on that I wanted some continuity with my notebooks.  Slides default at widescreen - 16:9.  I change the size to 8.5:11.  I want our notebooks to mimic paper notebooks AND 8.5:11 means I can easily print out pages of our notebook if I ever need to.   I also decided to create a notebook per grading period.  Each grading period our DINs easily contain a hundred + slides.  This is because our Digital Notebooks contain our reading selections in addition to our literary concepts.  It is an all in one teaching & studying tool.  Our notebooks are the foundation for all our learning and we used them daily.

Each DINs has a cover slide where students add their name.  The cover helps to make the notebook their own and makes the resource a little more formal.  In addition, as students add their own names, I get to teach them some cool skills which I need them to know like how to change the font, the size, the color, etc.  Our Notebooks also include our student objectives for our current grading period.  It is important to me that students know what our academic focus is.

In my district, every grading period focuses in on a Literary Genre.  In our DINs students know upfront what they will be expected to learn.

There are some things I have learned along the way.  First, when building your notebook remember, you are not limited to the slide.  Digital Interactive Notebooks are typically not used in presentation mode.

For example, when reviewing Growth and Fixed Mindsets in our first grading period's DIN,  students would simply drag and drop to sort Fixed and Growth Mindset statements.


This allowed for a quick check of their level of comprehension.  Notice that when Google Slides is in edit mode, the foreground of the slide is a usable space.  In our Growth Mindset activity, the foreground housed our mindset statements.  Other times, the foreground became where we annotated our stories.  Cool right?!

Whatever your subject, whatever your grade, going digital with your Interactive Notebooks can be a powerful way to take your student learning to the NEXT LEVEL!

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