3 Steps for Creating a Digital Interactive Notebook

I’ve been using interactive notebooks for six years now. These notebooks have been my saving grace with teaching students who may not be that into math. 

When my school district announced that we would be virtual until October, I began to search the Internet for the digital version of my interactive notebook. I was really shocked to find out that teachers were using digital interactive notebooks for a long time. 

Since we are teaching virtually now is a perfect time to implement math digital interactive notebooks in my classroom. After creating my notebook, I realized that there were certain steps that can be taken to streamline the process of creating a digital interactive notebook.

Set a Goal  

A lot of teachers skip this step because some teachers see interactive notebooks as cute or fun. This shouldn’t be the reason why you’re thinking about implementing an interactive notebook. 

Before you decide to start using any kind of interactive notebook, you have set the purpose for implementing it in your classroom. If you have a purpose, then it’s easy to set a goal for the students. For example, I first began using interactive notebooks because my fifth graders didn’t know how to write on notebook paper. So, my goal for them at the end of the school year was for them to learn how to copy from the board and write legibly between the margins.

Choose Colors and Font

I’m not the artsy type so it takes me a while to decide about font and colors. So I decided to purchase some watercolor digital papers from Hidesy’s Clipart. I really liked the soft colors so to make it easy for myself I just used the colors from the digital paper as my color pallet.

Deciding which font to use wasn’t that difficult. I normally use the Montserrat font. I stick with this font because it has light and bold versions.

Create Your Layouts

There’s one major difference between a digital interactive notebook and a spiral interactive notebook is digital interactive notebooks must have predetermined layouts.

Since this wasn’t my first time creating an interactive notebook, I pretty much had an idea for the different graphic organizers I used in my spiral interactive notebook. I added the notebook paper clipart to my pages because I wanted the students to get the feel that it was a notebook.

It was never my intention to implement a digital interactive notebook in my classroom. With everything going and the Covid-19 Pandemic, it’s a perfect addition to my teaching tech tools. Depending on how well my students adjust to the digital interactive notebook it may just replace my spiral notebook.

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