Notetaking is a critical classroom skill, but it’s also something that’s often overlooked or taken for granted. The idea of “taking notes” seems simple enough on the surface, but what does this process really entail? How do we know what information is relevant and what isn’t? This can often be difficult to determine, especially while being in the moment of capturing information. And for students that struggle with attention, writing, vision, hearing, or even mobility, taking legible and relevant notes in class is especially challenging.
Glean Notes seeks to streamline the standard notetaking experience by offering a simple, multi-sensory approach to taking notes in class. With Glean, each note-taking session or “event” begins with a recording, with additional text-based notes and comments being centered around and tied to the recorded audio. Typed notes appear as dots on your audio timeline, and clicking on a dot will highlight the relevant note as well as play the audio that was recorded as the note was typed.
Once a recording is complete or temporarily paused it can be played back at a variety of speeds from 0.5x to 3x. This feature alone makes the app incredibly useful to students who face any of the challenges mentioned above, as the app gives struggling students the opportunity to re-listen to any given lesson in a quiet, relaxed environment, with headphones on, and at half speed if necessary.
Labels can then be used to identify important sections, mark sections for review, and even create tasks for later. Headings allow users to separate sections of text, thus keeping events organized and structured.
Events can then be found using the built-in search tool, or, by manually looking through “Collections”. Collections allow users to group related lessons together, so for example, a student could create a collection specifically for Math or English or if they have multiple math courses, they could create one collection for algebra and another collection for trigonometry.
And to get even more out of the app, Glean users can log on to the web-based version of the app via PC and add slides to their notes, creating an even richer and more complete notetaking experience.
Right now, Glean is offering free unlimited access for 30 days, with no credit card required. To learn more, click here(new window).
