This is a presentation and conversation with Professor Wess Daniels and a group of professors, college staff, and undergraduate students from the 6 classes that have learned Progressive Summarization at Guilford College in North Carolina.

It includes a slide presentation with key themes and learnings from their experience, a live demonstration of performing progressive summarization collaboratively in real time, and at the end a discussion of how and why digital note-taking should be taught as an essential skill for students.

The main points include:

  • The benefits of adapting Progressive Summarization to the classroom
  • Creating a life-long knowledge bank for use far beyond the classroom
  • Starting the class by showing students how to take notes, instead of just reviewing the syllabus
  • How to organize class notes using Google Docs
  • Guidelines for source citations and naming conventions
  • Using “12 favorite problems” to guide learning and class discussions
  • Designing notes to more deeply interact with the content and enable “glanceability”
  • Balancing context and compression in class notes
  • A Progressive Summarization checklist for students
  • Best practices and recommendations from student’s experiences
  • Teacher-student feedback using Google Docs
  • Details of Professor Daniels’ experience teaching P.S. to 6 cohorts of undergraduate students
  • Live demonstration of real-time collaborative progressive summarization and annotation

Here are some online resources on using Progressive Summarization in the classroom generously provided by Prof. Daniels:

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