In my Honors Biology class the students are required to take their notes for my class twice. Once as a “messy” version that tey can doodle on and make mistakes on, and then another clean and well organized version. I don’t check this, rather, its on the “Honor” system… get it. But seriously though, I encourage our students to use notability one of the two times. Most choose to do it as the clean version because of the ability to highlight and color code their notes. On my end, I always provide a ‘pdf template’ for them to take their notes on. This usually means Cornell Notes (if you’re unfamiliar with Cornell notes, let me know and I’ll send you info, otherwise I’ll post on here about them soon)…

Cornell notes organize the notes into “Key Ideas” and allow the notes to be the answer to the Key.

The advantage of using a ‘pdf template’ is that the students can easily download them directly to notability and write over the top.

Notability may be great for notes… but it’s even better for graphic organizers. Using the iPad, notability, and a predetermined graphic organizer allows for an opportunity to collaborate with fellow students and share ideas causing the graphic organizer to grow (Talkboard is a great app for collaboration too!). The key is to start with a simple shape, and let the students decide what should go where. There is no right answer when it comes to graphic organizers because it is based on the way the individual student, or group of students, thinks.

Example of a simple graphic organizer from our cells unit

So download that app and crack it open. If this post helped you, or if there are other ways I can be of assistance, please contact me and let me know.