Ed tech to help writers and readers: PowerNotes

I've always been interested in how teachers can use the many available apps and digital tools to help teach writing more effectively, and in my roles both as the Director of Drexel's University Writing Program as well as President of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators, I've been exploring several particular tools in depth lately.

This time, I'll talk about PowerNotes. I've had multiple conversations with PowerNotes representatives, and through those conversations and my explorations, I have seen how this platform can help writers, as PowerNotes says in a YouTube video, "gather, track, and organize your research."

Like many apps, PowerNotes operates from inside a browser, in this case specifically via a Chrome Extension. Once installed, PowerNotes helps writers organize notes and develop annotations from digital sources. Working directly within Chrome, the writer

• Opens up a webpage or article (PowerNotes works on html text and PDFs, as long as the PDFs are opened in Chrome)
• Highlights text as they read
• Creates "topics"--a process built into PowerNotes--through which to organize those highlights
• Writes annotations (of any length)
• Edits and organizes these topics and highlights
• Develops an outline through a fjunction somewhat like "digital notecards"
• Creates citations based on these texts

The writer can also track their progress and download the material they've saved.

You can see graphics and screencaptures on the PowerNotes pages linked above, but I'll say here that the functionality is pretty slick, with shortcut features to allow writers to streamline their annotating and note-taking--all the while possibly changing the way writers go about such activities.

As you work, you end up building a kind of outline. Even for those who aren't outliners, as I'm not, I could immediately see how the organizational structure enabled by the app could help with writing structure. For instance, I'm working on a big project right now: A book. I'm reading a series of different articles about mobile technologies, and instead of creating clunky headings and entries in a Word or Google doc--a long-standing approach that I've used--I have the organization created basically as I clip quotes and annotate.

Aside from the specific advantages of this platform, I want to say that generally I believe those of us not just in OWI but comp/rhet should cultivate our relationships with technology innovators more fully. Smart people are developing tools that can help our students read and write as well as assist our many colleagues who teach writing in WID and WAC environments. We have things to learn from these tools, and technological determinism aside, these students and colleagues could be big beneficiaries from our informed explorations.

How much should you keep in the course?

So many apps can help us do our work as online writing and literacy instructors, and I do think it's important and valuable that you play with new tools, as such ongoing experimentation will inevitably refresh and perhaps improve your pedagogy.

But I was struck by a recent conversation with a friend of mine. His bright high school student was struggling a bit, and one of the issues was that the student had many different web sites/stops for reading, resources, and other materials for his classes. He had trouble keeping track of it all.

That made me think and reflect on my own practice. While I believe paragraph one above--after all, I wrote it!--and I am always introducing new tools outside of the LMS to students, I think sometimes we can get too fancy for our own good--perhaps to the detriment of our students' learning.

For instance, there are great meeting and appointment apps: think Doodle. But when I want to set up conferences with my students, I usually set them up right on the discussions; I list times and then have students respond, asking them to change the subject line to include their last name and time choice. It's a little clunky, but that conference conversation is right there when they do their other work in the course.

In fact, in my asynchronous course, I continue to have much of the "action" right there on those discussions. Teaching approaches that might perhaps be conducted via blogs, wikis, or even more advanced versions of discussion boards themselves (such as that solid communications app, Slack), I still often conduct on the LMS discussion board, warts and all.

I supposed this thinking drives my ongoing use of a Weekly Plan in my OWCs: I'm trying to reduce the amount of virtual "traveling" students will do so they can focus on developing their writing and literacy.

I think we have to consider critically how much we ask students to venture outside the LMS and to what ends. Hey, try cool tools, but be mindful of the student experience.

Now of course, students are whisking and cycling through social media all the time, so it might seem kind of dumb to worry about their use of a meeting app, but I continue to think that an important part of my job is to make students comfortable with the interface--and then I'll push them, often outside their comfort zone, when it comes to the writing work in the course.