Description of Online Learning Tasks
Most learning tasks for this module will be completed collaboratively in groups of three to four. Each task features a pre-created Google Document where students will work together to complete the task. The rationale for pre-creating Google Documents was to avoid students having to create their own Google accounts -- pre-creating the Google Document also ensures that the teacher can easily access the document to monitor student progress and ensure that they are on the right track.
Learning Task 5 will not be completed collaboratively and will involve students creating a post on the class blog.
Learning Task 1
Note-taking Conventions and Abbreviations
For review, students will first watch a YouTube video featuring helpful tips for taking good notes. As a first note-taking exercise, students will individually take notes from this video, concentrating on its main ideas or tips. After taking individual notes, they will work in small groups in Google Documents to compare the notes that each individual student took and discuss these notes. Do their notes capture the main ideas of the video? Did they attempt to write too much information?
After completing the note-taking exercise, students will then create another page in their group Google Document to brainstorm some abbreviations and symbols that could be used in their notes. To help students with this portion of the task, strategies for abbreviation and some common symbols will be pre-taught in class.
This learning task will be discussed and looked at in class upon completion.
Learning Task 2
Creating an Outline
For this learning task, students will work in groups of three or four to create note-taking outlines that they will use for Learning Task 4, which involves active note-taking. They will create these outlines using Google Documents, with each member choosing a different note-taking style to create an outline for.
Students will be encouraged to use existing note-taking styles to make their outlines, making edits to the style where they see fit in order to make the outline their own. The outlines created in this task will be used for the active note-taking exercise in Learning Task 4.
Learning Task 3
Discourse Markers and Summarizing a Lecture Transcript
Students will work with their group to complete an online scavenger hunt for common lecture discourse markers. The teacher will provide each group with a Google Document worksheet containing some of the most common lecture discourse markers. Students will then search online corpus search engines such as TED Corpus Search Engine (TCSE) or Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to find examples of these discourse markers in transcribed speech. Students will copy and paste these examples into the worksheet, then write a short description regarding the source and context of the example (eg: TED Talk, news program, late night talk show).
After completing the scavenger hunt, students will then read a lecture transcript, highlight and look up any unknown vocabulary, highlight discourse markers that they see in the transcript, and write a summary of the lecture's main argument.
The COCA is not overly intuitive to use, therefore the teacher will cover how to use both this corpus as well as the TCSE in class prior to student completion of this learning task.
Learning Task 4
Active Note-taking from Video
This learning task will involve active collaborative note-taking. Working in their groups, students will watch a TED Talk selected by the teacher and take notes from it. Each student will take notes using the outline that they personally created in Learning Task 2. Students will then compare their notes to their group members', working collaboratively to create a complete set of notes based on the TED Talk. They will use The Cornell Method of note-taking to complete these notes. Students will also discuss the usefulness of the original outlines that they created and whether there is anything that they would change about them. This discussion will also take place in class.
To help students with this task, they will be encouraged to use the subtitles provided with the video and to consult the transcription. This particular talk features transcriptions in thirty two additional languages, which will also help aid students' understanding.
Learning Task 5
Blog Post
For this activity, students will be working individually. They will be required to choose a video off of YouTube which discusses something of interest to them -- this would preferably be a TED Talk, but other opinion/lecture-style pieces will be accepted. Students will be required to post the video to the class blog, along with a set of notes taken from the video and a summary written from these notes. Students will then be required to review and comment on at least one classmate's blog post. The teacher will review and assess these blog posts for content.