Use of mobile devices in the classroom for note taking..

 
With internet now available at almost everywhere, the possibilities to have acces to tools like Evernote, Skitch, LucidChart, Google Docs, Conceptboard or other note taking apps bring students different ways and opportunities to summarize, take notes, organize their ideas in mind maps and write down key concepts of a lesson while they keep engaged and focus  in the process. The benefits of many of these tools, is that students can have access to their notes wherever and whenever they are, they can share them with other students even outside the classroom, or with their teachers to receive feedback, and at the same time they can use their mobile devices to research more about the lesson to enrich their notes and knowledge.  You give students the opportunity to take responsibility of their own learning process by giving them the possibility to access for more information, and at the same time you help them find different ways to organize, analyze and summarize the information they receive. What I have noticed in my classroom is that by using these tools, students feels more aware of the way they learn, they get to know more about themselves, and choose the tool that better fits his or her skills and needs. Students with different learning styles or different capacities find more comfortable, confident and safe when they can decide the better way to organize their ideas and write them down. I have seen students do wonderful mind maps in minutes, while others prefer to write the main ideas in bullets and other prefer to summarize and write their thoughts and own ideas of what they understood.