Digital Note Cards

Just a quick one today: a new trick for an old technique: making note cards.

Sometimes it is appropriate for your students to make a set of note cards.The classic "old-school" example is teaching students to write research papers: they would put sources, quotes, and other important info on index cards, and could then sort the cards afterward to organize the sections of their paper. Even for writing without research source, some teachers would have students make note cards to help organize content paragraphs of a longer piece of writing. Note cards are great for encouraging thoughtful planning before you start "just writing stuff down" in your document.

​"Is this enough note cards for my 3 paragraph essay?"

The biggest advantage of note cards, of course, is their ease of re-ordering. You can just flip through the cards around and keep re-arranging until you are happy with their sequence.

However, when a teacher collects these cards for review, a few problems arise:

• When the teacher has the cards, the students can't use them
  
• Modern online sources are hard to write down by hand on paper cards.
  (One missed character when hand-writing https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/google-helps-nasa-s-kepler-telescope-find-eighth-exoplanet-around-ncna829821 means you'll never find the source again.)
  
• If the cards get lost or ruined (even just one or two), the project is in trouble.

A digital solution would be safer and easier to maintain. However, a Google or Word doc would not be a great answer. Sure, you could type it all into the doc, but then when re-ordering the content, you'd be copy-pastingeverything around, and you risk making big, hard-to-fix mistakes. 

On the other hand, when you really think about it, Google Slides and PowerPoint are essentially digital note cards with fancy formatting. When you make a slideshow, you are creating small visual and text snippets that you show one at a time. They are easy to make, easy to re-order, easy to add and delete, and capable of holding text, links, images, and any other helpful info. They can be easily shared and annotated. And every one of your students already knows how to use Google Slides. And they're free.

This image shows how an extra-nerdy teacher (one beyond our basic, built-in nerdiness) actually formatted Google Slides with red and blue lines like paper index cards. It's kind of cool, but not really necessary. (The image also shows how to print the cards 9 per page, if you really need the dead-tree version.)

I've used this technique a few times myself. For example, when I wanted to propose a new project, my first step was a Google Slides slideshow, not because I intended to present it on a projector, but because it forced me to organize my thoughts and important points into discrete chunks that I could easily re-arrange. Things I needed to research (e.g. "how much will this cost?") got blank cards, as reminders to fill in later. When the time came to deliver my proposal, I didn't do a "stand-and-talk" presentation...but the slides helped me plan out my talking points. It also tricked Nicole into thinking I was very organized (Nicole, don't read that last part).

This doesn't work for everything, of course. If your note card assignment is more of the flash-card variety, you'd be better off using Quizlet. But that's a tip for another day. Consider that one a bonus Techmas tip .

Hmm, as I proofread this, I realize that this 12 Days tip isn't as funny as some of my others, so here's more of that panda playing in the snow from the other day.

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Cheers!