Digital tools future teachers love for notes, planning, and organization

0:00 But during that first class at 8:00 AM, let's get this party started. This podcast is a crowd member of the Teach Better Podcast Network, Better Today, Better Tomorrow, and a podcast to get you there. Explore more podcasts at www.teachbetterpodcastnetwork.com. Now let's get on to the episode. Hello, Edgy magicians, and welcome back to another episode of the Edgy Magic Podcast. My name is Doctor Sam Fessage and today the podcast is being taken over by future teachers at Slipperock University. In this episode, you're going to hear from three groups of students that are talking about tools to help with planning, organization, taking notes. And you're going to hear about those tools from different perspectives, from a teacher perspective and is using it as a student.

0:49 So buckle up and enjoy these wonderful segments brought to you by future teachers at Subrock University. All right, let's take it away. Hey guys, I'm Ali. I'm Lila. And today we're going to talk about how to be a noteworthy note taker with notability, and we're going to have a great time. So excited. So we're going to go a few things is what we're going to be talking about today. Some things that it does, who it's for, tool features, suggestions on maybe what to do or what not to do, some challenges you might have with it, Accessibility features are always awesome and the why you should use it. Yeah. OK.

1:30 So notability, what it is, it's a digital note taking app for only Apple products. So you can use that with your iPad, your iPhone or your Mac. And it lets students, teachers, users, whoever is using it. They can write, they can draw, they can type, they can record audio, and they can also annotate PDFs, which is super cool. So this is a really great tool that you can use inside and outside of the classroom. It's for teachers and students or really anybody who needs extra help and doing problems, yeah. I personally, I love notability as a student and as a future teacher, as a college student, I use it for every single one of my math classes, any class where I have to take notes. It's just so great and awesome.

2:21 And then you can also use it for personal use too. I don't know, coloring like picture templates online and other stuff like that too. So these are some of the features. You can auto audio record and it can sync to your notes. So what that means is as someone's talking to you or as you're talking to your notes, you can hit that little record button on the app. And what it does is it can play back at what time you talked correlated to when you're writing the note, which is really cool, especially for math because if you forget how to do something, you're looking at your notes. You're like, wait, like I don't really understand this. You can re watch when you took the notes and then the dialogue that went along with it. And then you can be like, oh, this makes sense. You can annotate PDFs and you can also mark up PDFs too, which is really nice for bigger documents taking like little notes and stuff.

3:17 You can also have two like notability things up or you can have you can do a little split screen action and you can have your content up on one side and then you can be taking notes on the other side. So you don't even need more than one device to use notability. You can also use it for you can do stickers shapes and you can also like highlight your stuff. But it's also really nice because you can handwrite your notes or you can use the handwriting tool and you can make it into like text, which is nice. So maybe if your handwriting isn't the best for other people to read back, they can like actually, yeah.

3:57 You can also use the templates like the planners, the graph paper, and the checklist. Personally, I love the planner tool because I can write out my week, keep it on my notability, and then I can't ever lose my paper for it. So some some suggestions that we have. Obviously we said it's only for Apple. So we need like an Apple Pencil or a stylus, so it's easier to write and do things with instead of just using your finger. Obviously we need Apple product and then it really just helps you organize your notes. Yeah, yeah. So some considerations. Again, you do need an Apple product to use it. We're going to reiterate this a ton. If you're an Android user, sorry, this isn't the product, this isn't the app for you.

4:46 But if you're an Apple user, it's absolutely wonderful. Again, it doesn't cross platforms, so yeah. And then you can also choose to use the free version, but then you can also pay for a subscription. So if you want to access like all the tools and stuff, you would have to pay for that subscription. But it's also really nice because you can try it out for the first time and you don't have to pay for it and you can still use it for accessibility. This is really great for students who struggle academically in school and need a little extra assistance because again, with that audio recording, you can play it back and it can help you relearn the content without having to go back up and ask your teacher or anything like that. Also, with notability, you can zoom. You can magnify all the things.

5:34 So say if you're reading a PDF, you can zoom in, make those words a little bit bigger. Or even with your writing, you can write really big on the screen, but then you're still not taking up the whole page because you can zoom right out, which is really nice. You can use that highlighter tool and kind of color coordinate your stuff. And you can customize maybe like the really important stuff you're going to be writing in green and the not so important stuff you're going to be writing in blue. So you can figure out like how you want to best organize your notes without having to like physically switch. I'm writing with the blue pen or I'm writing with the green pen. And then you also have a typing option too. If you have bad handwriting, this is really helpful because you can actually read back your you're not just lost and confused. So we're both future math teachers, so it's really big tool that we want to implement in our classrooms. So here's a few examples of how we're going to implement in our classrooms and how it's helpful, especially in math. It helps you work through your problems digitally. Basically what that means is you can use it to write your problems and then you can use your pencil and go through your problems.

6:48 And then if you need help or like your teacher can get on there and help you and then you can go through your notes again, watch your notes, watch it being done out on your notes like as your teacher does it. And then you can do it as she's doing it on your notability. So just works like hand in hand. So you like can get help like right then and there without waiting for your teacher. And then also it helps visualize. So it's really good at making shapes, graphs, things like that that you might not be able to do freehand. So that helps like just with any like geometry problems or obviously graphing. Graphing is very hard to do, especially when it's like 100 by 100 graph. You could just have it do it for you so you don't have to write out 100 little tick lines up and down on the axises, yeah. Yeah, really great tools.

7:34 I definitely think notability really helps keeps your notes like really organized, structured, And then again, like you can move stuff around, you can duplicate stuff. So you don't have to spend all the time in the world doing it all by yourself because you can use that technology and it can just help make things more efficient when you're writing your notes, which is really awesome. Another boat. Why is notability like valuable? Again, we're just gonna reiterate it. It helps you organize your notes better. You can record people talking and it can like sync up with your notes. And then you can also literally store everything in one place. I know this is really helpful as a student and then also as a teacher because everyone's going to be taking more than one class.

8:15 And so if you're a student, you're going to be having anywhere between 4:00 to 8:00 or nine classes in a school day. And so keeping all your notes like together is like really challenging. But it can be really helpful that it's just all in one place because I know myself personally, I'm always losing my notebooks and papers and stuff. And so it's in one solid place, which is really great. OK. So basically from all of this, our key take away is that notability turns math, which is like our specific focus and to math learning. It's a more organized visual and expressive process. It's just a very helpful tool in general and you could use it for other subjects, but we're like math focus. So that's what we want to use. It for yeah, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you learned a lot about notability. I know that we did when we were making this presentation. And yeah, I hope.

9:07 Check it out, check it out, check it out. It's definitely worth your while. Have a great day. Thanks for tuning in. Hi, I'm Ryan and this is my presentation on Google Calendar. What is Google Calendar? Google Calendar is a great time management and scheduling tool, and it allows you to create, manage, and share events. It functions as a digital planner that syncs across all of your devices, ensuring that you have your schedule accessible whether you're at your desk or on the go. What is Google? Calendar. It provides event creation, easily scheduling meetings, classes or deadlines with specific times, locations and descriptions. You can have multiple calendars which you can separate in color code for different areas of your life, for example, work, school, and professional, and toggle them on or off to declutter your view. Google Calendar has smart integration, which means it'll automatically pool events and details from Gmail like upcoming meetings or due dates, and it integrates with Google Classroom also, where assignment due dates will automatically appear for both teachers and students on the calendar. Google Calendar is great for classroom management and teaching students how to manage their work and managing your own workload and schedule as an educator. Google Classroom has layered classroom views which create different calendars for homework and tests that students can toggle on and off.

10:28 It provides smart attachments. You can link Google Drive rubrics and templates directly to the day they are due or needed. It provides predictability for students with Ieps or classroom anxiety by providing actually blocked times for when things are due or important upcoming events, which is important for modeling to digital citizenship. You can just click on a day or a time to create an event. You decide the name, the time, add notes, loop in others. By adding guests. You can add a Google meet or a video conferencing link. You can also choose what calendar you want to visible on. For example, you could make a class calendar where all the information that your students need is accessible like due dates and important school events. A calendar for your own professional management, parent meetings when grades are due, reminders set for yourself. And you can make a calendar for personal reminders, loved ones, birthdays, reminders, appointments. When you create an event, you can choose which calendar you want to add it to and who gets to see it. Each calendar will display as different color for you to keep things organized, sharing with the class, or for your own organization.

11:42 You can check or uncheck the calendars to make sure they are displayed or hidden. For example, if you're sharing with your U.S. History class, you can uncheck all of the irrelevant calendars that your students only see upcoming due dates for your U.S. History class. You can invite people to share each calendar differently. For example, if you had a world History class, you could share that calendar with all of your world history students. And if you had AUS History calendar, you could share that with all of your U.S. history. Students. And Google Calendar connects to the Danielson framework in that it follows domain 4B, which is maintaining accurate records. Your calendar serves as a time stamp logged. Every parent contact and instructional minute connects to domain 4C. Communicating with families.

12:28 A shared calendar is showing you keep families informed before they even have to ask. Domain 1 E Designing coherent instruction. Mapping out a unit on a calendar provides that your lessons are logically sequenced and timed. And Domain 3C student engagement. When students know what's next, they take more ownership over their learning base. And that is all. Thank you. Hello, I'm Monica Gibson. I'm Sarah Dummell. And for our podcast segment, we chose to talk briefly about Google Docs. Google Docs is a super easy to use, free, easy to get acquainted with, and super versatile technology tool that's great for both teachers and students.

13:10 Which is why we chose it, because we felt that like looking at something that was good from both the teacher and student perspective would be a little more helpful for the purposes of this project and in general. From the teacher perspective, Google Docs is really good with taking. It's. It records the student keystrokes and edits on any document, making it super easy to be able to see what a student did on their own, how long it took them to make something, if they copy and pasted what, things like that. So it helps keep students honest and teachers aware of what's going on in their classrooms and the assignments getting turned in and then. Yeah, it's, that's one of my favorite features about it, is that as an educator, especially as someone going into English education, I can look at what my students are writing and if I'm a little wary on something, I'm like, oh, that seems like a big word.

13:57 Oh, that seems like a complicated sentence pattern. This the. Grammar is a. Little too good here. I can look and see if they actually typed it out themselves when they backspaced, what their edits look like, what their drafts look like. Which makes it really easy to make sure that your students are being honest and acting with integrity whenever they write. For our historical writings, I'm a history teacher. In my perspective, it really helps to see when students quote primary sources, they're including other resources, what they did truly summarize or cite, or to what extent their academic honesty is apparent with their use of quotations in their work. And it's also free.

14:37 Yeah, it is just like the best part for both teachers and students. Yeah. That's something we put on both of our slides here. From the student perspective, it's pretty much the same. It tracks your keystrokes, which as a student who's doing a lot of writing, is excellent because if a teacher thinks you're using AI or you're copying from someone else, you can really easily disprove it. I make sure that any assignment I turn in, I also turn in a docx just because then my educator can see exactly what I wrote when I wrote it, how I edit it, etcetera. It also auto saves, which is excellent for the forgetful student, which is another thing that I really benefit from. If I had a dollar for every time I've closed a Microsoft Word without saving it, I think I'd be a millionaire. And so auto save on Google Docs just saves me consistently. And it's free.

15:26 Like it's free. You just can't beat free, especially as an educator where like a lot of the time you're picking up the slack in places where your district can't, especially financially. Meeting students where you are is so important in the software. All you need is a computer and a free Google account. So it's super accessible. And then also I feel like with that auto save and that track feature, it's super awesome to track your progress as a student. You can see when I made an edit, you know to what extent I made an edit and you're having that auto save feature as well. So you don't have to worry about saving it. That software is going to do it for you and take it or take note of what you recorded when you recorded it. And that's really good, valuable information if you're looking to track your growth or progress in certain assignments. Yeah. And to be able to have that all in the cloud is also excellent, because then if something happens to your device, you can log into Google on anything else and still have the work that you've done. So that's all for our presentation. Thank you for your time.

16:21 Thank you for listening listening to us talk about Google Docs. Enjoying the sunshine out here today. It's so nice. It's going to rain soon, but the weather has been really excellent. So we were like, let's sit outside, you know? Let's enjoy Google Docs from anywhere because lucky for us that cloud you can use Google Docs anywhere with Internet access love. It Yeah. Bye. Thank you. Bye. And there you have it, Edu Magicians. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share it with your friends. For more Edu Magic, check out S fessage.com and follow Doctor Sam on Twitter and Instagram at S fessage. Until next time you have the Edu Magic within you.