Starting early last year I noticed that students would take photographs of notes I’d written on the board with their smart-phones. What a great idea, I thought – at first. Then I noticed that on some assignments my own on-the-whiteboard language was being parroted back to me. Here is my friend Clarissa’s smart take on the topic:
Studies show that copying information from the blackboard by hand allows students to retain a lot more knowledge than typing this information.
Typing, however, is an outdated trend. Today, students don’t type. They photograph. Time and again, I see a student snooze through the class period only to take a photo of the blackboard at the end of class. This is, of course, a lot more useless than typing. If you haven’t heard the lecture and haven’t tried to make it meaningful to yourself through taking your own notes, the scribbles on the blackboard will have no meaning to you.
I don’t forbid photographing of the blackboard but I always wonder why such a silly method of note-taking even exists.
