Digital Notes and Annotations: Improving Content Organization and Learning Support

This presentation introduces digital note-taking as a method to enhance organized and flexible learning experiences. Digital note-taking helps students manage course materials while adding annotations, highlights, and multimedia, supporting active learning through reflection, self-explanation, and paraphrasing. Real-time feedback and comments are facilitated with digital annotation tools, enabling students to benefit from both face-to-face and asynchronous help. We provide interactive demos of this method using OneNote as a platform for homework support and collaboration, as it integrates with MS Teams, which is our course organization platform of choice. This use of organized content and note-taking is based on Professor Ralucca Gera's educational strategy to focus on meaningful digital learning in physical classrooms, online environments, and hybrid learning environments at the Naval Postgraduate School. Professor Gera has provided numerous demos and training sessions for faculty on the use of MS Teams, OneNote, and digital notes, which have been recorded and are available on YouTube, and we encourage instructors to engage in this conversation and demo of digital notes and annotation.