Digital Interactive Notebooks, Part 2: Adding to your Students' Collection

My last post demonstrated a way to use Google Slides and Drawings to make a digital interactive notebook. I had demonstrated this process at the SPARCC conference in August and a woman who attended my session emailed me this weekend with this question:

"When I was [using] worksheets, glue, and composition books, I was able to compose their notes as we went. These notebooks were continually changing. I'm having trouble seeing how this well work digitally since once I share a copy of the Notebook with them, I'm not seeing how to send out additional notes."

This is a great area for further consideration! There are two ways I would address this in my classroom, depending on how much or how often or how long I have been using interactive notebooks:

1. I've been using interactive notebooks for years.

If you've been using interactive notebooks for a long time, you probably have a demo notebook or examples from previous years. You might make changes from year to year, but you have the basics down. In this case, I would build a digital interactive notebook for a unit at a time. Instead of one composition notebook that contains everything from the year, you might have 10 different slide decks that function as one "chapter" of the total. Then you could use your example notebooks from years past to build all the templates you need for a particular notebook and share it with your students at the beginning of the unit.

2.  I'm teaching new content or new to interactive notebooks or teaching

If you're just getting started with interactive notebooks, or if you're just getting started with a new prep, you might not have a full idea of what the finished product will look like. Or maybe student questions cause you to take the notebook in an unforeseen direction. Or maybe you have an amazing idea a few days into the unit. Or maybe you want to use a particular template over and over again in many "chapters" of interactive notebooks. If so, the "import slides" option can be very helpful.

In Google Slides, you can import slides from one Google Slides deck (or Power Point presentations) into another deck. I would have my Notebook template made in Google Slides and shared as "View Only" with my students. Then, if I needed to add a page to their notebook, I would create and add the page to my Notebook template and tell the students to import that page from the View Only Template.

Below are some screenshots that demonstrate the steps to import slides from one deck into another. Have students start inside the interactive notebook file they are creating.

Click File and drag down to import slides:

In the pop-up window that appears, click on the presentation (notebook template) that contains the new slides they need for the notebook.

In the pop-up window, click on the new slides that will be added to the notebook. Then click Import slides.

It's important to know that you can import one page or every page just by clicking to select. As long as your template has been shared with the students and you make changes to the template, the students will be able to import the new slides they need for their notebook. This is a great feature for students and teachers to know, even if you're not using it for interactive notebooks.

Using Google Slides & Drawings to Make Interactive Notebooks

If you were using interactive notebooks in the spring of 2017, you probably remember the Great Glue Shortage. Somehow that spring making slime exploded onto the scene and glue was hard to come by. I know this because my son had 7th grade social studies that year with a rockstar teacher named Nikki Diehm. My son, who has hated crafts involving scissors and glue for his entire life, loved this class, and especially this teacher, and even seemed to embrace the making of the social studies interactive notebook. So when she asked everyone to help replenish the glue supply, he begged me to help get her some. The trouble was: there was no glue on store shelves anywhere. Because slime.

It was then that I first started thinking about digital interactive notebooks. As a high school teacher, glue is often a deal breaker for me. The getting it out, the everyone is sticky, the cleanup - these things make it not worth it for me. I do love the idea of interactive notebooks, though. My students have always really enjoyed using foldables and an interactive notebook seems like the place where you glue your foldable for instant notes + study tool.

Here is a sample I made. The background was created in Google Drawing. The blue rectangles are shapes I made in Slides and animated to disappear upon click.




Digital Interactive Notebooks are all over Pinterest; there are as many methods as people pinning them. Here are directions for my version:

1. Create a Google Slides deck as Interactive Notebook template.

2. Change size in Page Setup to 8.5” x 11”. Lots of people don't realize that slide size can be changed. See images below for tips to do this.

3. Create Google Drawing and change size in Page Setup to 8.5” x 11” (same as above). 

4. Create graphic organizer as Drawing. Download as JPG. 

5. Insert the Drawing JPG as Background on a Slide. This will keep the graphic organizer locked in place (unless students change the background of the slide).

6. Make copies for every student through Classroom or by providing the link. 

7. Kids create textboxes and shapes and add animations to make it interactive.

I want to be clear about a couple of things before I hit Publish. First, I probably wouldn't have thought about interactive notebooks in a digital way if it weren't for the fact that my son had an amazing teacher who he loved and who used them AND there was a glue shortage. I appreciate many things I have learned by listening to my kids talk about Nikki's classes. Second, I am a fan of Interactive Notebooks - digital, paper and glue, or otherwise. I'm not posting this because I think everything should be digital. In fact, I do not think that. 

If you try this or if this post was helpful, I hope you'll share that. Thanks for reading!