Digital Doodle Notes: 7 Helpful Combinations for Hybrid and Remote Science Teaching

2020 = Flexibility

For anyone who knows me, you know I have a deep love for visual aesthetics. My Cornell Doodle Notes were born out of a need for my students to not only record information but to also do it in a meaningful and memorable way. With this global pandemic, we have all been searching for answers and authentic learning experiences for our students in a 100% virtual manner. It’s been a monumental task that we educators were forced into overnight. I don’t know about you, but my district’s re-entry plan here in New Jersey is giving students a hybrid and full remote option. These are strange times, and it brings about a set of unique circumstances for the 2020-2021 school year. Today I’m bringing you 7 ways that you can use digital doodle notes to facilitate your science teaching, whatever that may look like for you this Fall.

Don’t miss the FREE SAMPLERS that I’m providing at the bottom of this post!

What are Cornell Doodle Notes?

If you’re unfamiliar with my Cornell Doodle Notes, you can check out my blog post here for more information. In a nutshell, these notes are a structured, visual approach to note-taking, and scaffolded and coded at the top of each page for easy differentiation. The fact that students get to interact with diagrams and “doodle” while taking notes on science content creates a greater incentive and buy-in.  A win-win in my book, especially for middle schoolers! When I poll my students at the beginning of the year to determine their learning styles, a huge majority of them are always visual learners. For kids who learn best in a visual format, these doodle notes are a ticket to engagement.

Over time, and especially this past year, many teachers have requested that I make my Cornell Doodle Notes into a digital format. It took me the better part of the summer to figure out the best way to create these notes in a digital format, but many iterations later, I couldn’t be more excited to share them with you!

The Long-Awaited Digital Cornell Doodle Notes

The Google Slides Student Notes versions each include a cover slide, a student directions slide that is editable, a Google Tools slide that shows the different ways that students can interact with the notes, text boxes where students can type, and a Google Tools sidebar on each slide that students can refer to while note-taking.

The Google Tools include:

• add text boxes and change fonts (there are great ‘handwriting style’ Google Fonts embedded in the Slides!)
• use the Paint Bucket and Fill tools to color diagrams
• use the Scribble tool to free-hand draw
• add images from the internet to support the content
• drag movable highlighter strokes to highlight important information or things that he/she would like to stand out

Each set of the Cornell Doodle Notes also comes with a PowerPoint AND Google Slides presentation to make these notes a no-prep activity! Between these presentation options and the options for digital note-taking, I hope these notes provide you a lot of flexibility whether your school is completely remote or entering back in a hybrid-model this year. Here are a few ways you can use these Science Cornell Doodle Notes in your classroom for the 2020-2021 school year:

Doodle Note-taking on Paper

#1 USE THE HARD COPY DOODLE NOTES WITH THE 1:1 PRESENTATION

Many schools now have 1:1 laptops for students, which is a saving grace during this global pandemic. Since students will need to be socially distanced within the classroom, this is a great option for teachers who want students to continue practicing their note-taking and 1:1 correspondence skills. Distribute the paper copies, arm your students with colored pencils, and have the students pace themselves through the lesson using the Powerpoint or Google Slides presentation shared to them via Google Classroom or your LMS.

#2 RUN A SOCIALLY DISTANCED LAB ACTIVITY WITH DOODLE NOTE-TAKING 

With our new COVID-19 rules, the classroom lab expectations are going to look vastly different this year than in years past. I know I have been wondering myself how to run a lab with these new guidelines in place. You can use these doodle notes to maintain engagement and social distance. Here’s how. 

Divide your class into two groups. One group will complete the lab activity, which will allow for social distancing guidelines, and the other group can sit at their desks to complete the doodle notes using the Google Slides or PowerPoint presentation. Engagement will be happening in both groups and you can breathe easier knowing you’ve planned for a socially distanced learning activity.

#3 HOLD INDIVIDUAL CONFERENCES OR SMALL GROUP HELP SESSIONS

My hybrid students will be attending school every other morning. There will not be a ‘study hall’ period built into the students’ day. There will be no after school chit-chat/makeup lab/extra help time that has always been my favorite time of the school day! I anticipate a bit of a juggling act of facilitating authentic learning while keeping social distancing measures, planning for complicated schedules, and managing student absences due to sickness. What if I do a demonstration and four students miss it because they are absent? What if a handful of students need to re-do a lab activity but there is no longer an after school time available for make-ups? Holding small group sessions might be a way to check in with students that have spotty attendance or to support high needs students. But then, what to do with the rest of the class during that time? Use doodle notes!

In a previous post, I talked about how I trained my 8th grade students to complete their doodle notes completely independently. You can read about that here. Pull one or a handful of students to provide conferencing or a small group help session while the rest of the class completes their notes independently. Don’t forget: if you have any early finishers, you can post a couple of links to fun and relevant science pages or have students color in their doodle notes!

KEEP THE DOODLE NOTE-TAKING ALL DIGITAL

To decrease the give-and-take of germs, keeping all doodle notes digitally might be your best bet. If you choose to do this, you won’t have to distribute and collect anything from your students. If you distribute the notes via Google Classroom, you’ll be able to pop into your students’ work to check on their progress and provide feedback! Plus, your students won’t ever lose their hard work to their hungry lockers or kitchen tables. 

Here are some ideas for 100% digital doodle note-taking:

#4 Support 3-Dimensional Learning with Self-Paced Doodle Note-taking

Use your coveted in-person class time to facilitate discussion, run socially-distanced lab activities, or engage students in virtual simulations (read more about using virtual PhET labs in this blog post!). Support the in-person learning with at-home note-taking that’s self-paced. Assign one relevant topic at a time and give students a couple of days to complete their notes at home using the PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation. Share the presentation with them via Google Classroom or your LMS. Since my in-person students are attending every other day, I will assign them doodle notes to complete on their ‘home day’.

#5 Create Unit Packets of the Digital Doodle Notes

If you’re using the Google Slides Student Notes versions, open a new Google Slides document and resize the slides to standard 4:3 format (File –> Page Setup). Then, open up the Google versions of all of the topics relevant to the unit. Go to the first topic, select all of the slides, and press Ctrl+C to Copy. Go to the new Google Slides and press Ctrl+V to paste the slides. Do this for all of the topics in the unit and BAM! — you have a unit packet of digital doodle notes!

#6 Use Kami’s Split and Merge Tool to Create Leveled Unit Packets of Digital Cornell Doodle Notes to Use with Kami

Kami is a PDF and Document Annotation and Markup Tool that works with Google Drive and Google Classroom (along with Schoology and Canvas). Using Kami, students will be able to mark up their doodle notes using text boxes, highlighting, shapes, additional images from Google, and even voice commentary! Read more about using Kami in this post.

Once you have Kami installed and open in your internet browser, simply open the Split and Merge Tool and drag in all of the PDFs of the Cornell Doodle Notes you would like to add to the packet. You can easily delete any Teacher Notes pages and select specific pages to create leveled packets. My notes are coded with ‘ski slope symbols’, so you can just drag all of the Green Circle pages into one draft section, all of the Blue Square versions into another, and so on. Once your packets are made, assign them to your students using the Kami extension for Google Classroom, Schoology, or Canvas!

For more detailed directions on how to create a leveled unit packet to assign using Kami, download this freebie from my TPT store!

#7 Create Digital Doodle Notes Interactive Notebook Assignments

This would be a fun option, especially if your school is going to be completely remote. Students would create an interactive doodle notes notebook for each unit. You could take all of the Google Slides versions and combine them into one Google Slides document. Then, have students design a relevant digital cover for the unit. Students can also add additional slides to the notes to display relevant diagrams and pictures that they find online. This task will help them to solidify their understanding of the concepts.

Try this twist: make it an assignment for students to design a ‘Summary Slide’ at the end of the digital doodle notes. They could use text boxes (with fun fonts!), shapes, and images from the internet to create their Summary Slide. Take this a step further and ask them to record an audio explanation on top of their Summary Slide explaining what they chose to include and why. Compile all of the Summary Slides into one presentation to share with the class so that the students can view one another’s work.

If you have used these doodle notes in a different way, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a comment below or send me a message. I always appreciate hearing your feedback and learning new ways to use these resources!

Doodle notes is a trademarked term used with permission. Please visit doodlenotes.org for more information.

I am providing FREE SAMPLERS of my ROCK CYCLE CORNELL DOODLE NOTES and my NEWTON’S LAWS OF MOTION CORNELL DOODLE NOTES! Click the links above if you’re interested in receiving the free samples!