Taking a break from screens and other technology can feel refreshing because it removes distractions and the constant deluge of notifications and information. Students may also find it refreshing to take a break from technology in the classroom, especially if the low tech activity is a little fun or out of the ordinary.
One of the most versatile and inexpensive low tech tools is the sticky note. We love sticky notes because they are colorful and flexible, we can move them around to organize our ideas, and yet their small size forces us to be concise—the same reasons that make sticky notes an excellent resource for the college classroom.
Weekly Ed-Tech Spotlight:
Use Lecture Capture instead of Zoom, unless remote students need to interact! Once set up, Lecture Capture recordings happen automatically and provide students with the audio, slides, and video of the class session. Request Lecture Capture here. If your remote students need to interact (discussion, Q&A, etc.), get training in how to use Zoom with a room podium's capabilities.
In a 2015 study (Davis-Wiley & Wooten), professors at the University of Tennessee designed a note-taking strategy for their Literacy and ESL methods graduate students to interact with their assigned text readings using sticky notes to document their experiences. The goal of the activity was to encourage students to think metacognitively during their literacy meaning-making process. The researchers found the “sticky note/interacting-with-text approach” expanded the reader’s personal strategies for deriving meaning from text, suggesting that this method could be used as a teaching/reading/learning/reflecting and discussion-enhancing activity appropriate for all levels of post-secondary students. Comments from student evaluations included, “Sticky notes allow me to think in the moment and remember more about the text than if I were just summarizing,” and “Sticky notes grant me the freedom to express my thoughts, opinions, questions, and concerns with text that I might not have otherwise expressed” (Davis-Wiley & Wooten, 5).
Below are instructions for Davis-Wiley and Wooten’s “sticky note/interacting-with-text approach,” as well as two more creative techniques for using sticky notes in the classroom.
Interacting with Text
This technique asks students to use sticky notes to annotate their readings in textbooks, literature, and other assigned books. The goal is for students to document how they connect the reading to their personal background knowledge, life experiences, and social and cultural stances. As they read, interpret, and analyze the text/novel and make connections to previous knowledge, students synthesize their ideas onto a sticky note and attach the note on or near the relevant passage. Students should not think of the notes as a way to simply summarize; rather, they should include questions, connections, thoughts, ideas and reactions. Students can refer to their sticky notes during pertinent discussions, which can lead to more in-depth interpretations. The researchers also found that students strongly agreed that interacting with text using the sticky note approach was an important way to not deface the pages in their textbook—allowing students to annotate more freely and extensively (Davis-Wiley & Wooten, 3-6).
Graphic Organizers: Fishbone Diagram
Sticky notes are a flexible way to interact with team concept maps because the notes can be rearranged again and again to combine, separate, and synthesize ideas. There are many types of graphic organizers, each designed for a specific purpose. One example is the Fishbone diagram, which can help students slow down their thinking and analyze a problem. Fishbone diagrams are helpful when the goal is for students to learn that they can’t solve a problem until they have thoroughly analyzed what is causing the problem. Students are presented with a problem and directed to explore the causes before the solutions. To help them organize and visualize their ideas, they can draw the fishbone outline on a whiteboard, large piece of paper, or flip-chart. The problem or effect is displayed at the head or mouth of the fish. Possible contributing causes are listed on the smaller “bones” under various cause categories.
Use the fishbone diagram tool to keep the team focused on the causes of the problem, rather than the symptoms or solutions. Using sticky notes allows students the flexibility to group and rank causes . Consider going around the group asking each person for one cause. Continue going through the rounds, getting more causes, until all ideas are exhausted.
Wisdom of Crowds/Ranking Ideas
There may be times when a class will collect student-generated ideas and then the class will need to rank all the ideas presented. For example, groups may be brainstorming the causes of a particular problem and then they need to rank the causes in order of the most impact. Students can use the “Wisdom of Crowds'' approach to rank ideas. Each student is given sticky notes in different colors, with each color being assigned a rank, such as yellow (1-highest rank) to pink (3-lowest rank). Once all ideas are written on the board or a large flip-chart, students rank the ideas by placing a corresponding sticky note by that idea. So, if yellow is the highest ranking sticky note, a student will place it next to the idea they rank the highest. The beauty of this activity is that no one knows who placed their sticky note where and it is obvious at a glance which are the top ranked ideas. For example, if the yellow sticky note represents the highest rank, then the idea surrounded by the most yellow is the top ranking idea.
For more creative ways to use sticky notes with students or colleagues, check out Visual Meetings : How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity (2010), available online from the U-M Library. If you’d like to discuss how to best use such activities in your own course, please feel free to reach out to LSATSLearningTeachingConsultants@umich.edu or request a one-on-one consultation with one of the Learning and Teaching consultants.
References:
Davis-Wiley, P. & Wooten, D. (2015). Enhancing Metacognitive Literacy: A Research Study Using Sticky Notes in the Classroom. American International Journal of Contemporary Research, 5(4), 1-9.
Sibbet, D. (2010). Visual meetings: How graphics, sticky notes and idea mapping can transform group productivity. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu
