Regardless of my opinion of technology, I was required to research Evernote, so I reluctantly did. I downloaded it, played around with it and found that it was surprisingly intuitive and user friendly. It is basically an online notepad where you can create notes and organize them into notebooks by topic. It allows you to store text, documents, audio files, images, and web links. You can also annotate documents and images, share notes via email or social media, and set email reminders. I found it to be quite useful and even created my class handout directly in Evernote.
While playing around on Evernote, I was trying to think of ways it could be useful to both teachers and students. I was actually able to come up with quite a few ideas. I have included these below, though my list is in no way comprehensive.
For Teachers:
- Create Handouts and Lesson Plans
- Organize Materials and Lesson Plans by Units
- Create Personal or Classroom Checklists
- Clip and Store Webpages and Images
- Can Save Snapshots of Classwork (student writing/work on whiteboard) for later use
For Students:
- Type/Store In-class Notes
- Organize Notes, Assignments, Projects, etc. by class
- Schedule email reminders for important due dates
Overall, I think Evernote could be a useful organization tool for teachers and students, so I would recommend trying it out. I have also found Google Drive to be an immense help both a graduate student and teaching intern. Finally, Blendspace might be of interest for lesson planning for some teachers.
Kim, I really enjoyed reading your post and found myself smiling because I too shared similar sentiments when I found out that we were going to have to teach about an online organizational tool.
ReplyDeleteI have always been someone who likes taking handwritten notes, but after beginning college I realized that typing my notes was much more efficient for me personally. Even though I have gotten used to taking notes on the computer, I was skeptical of using an online tool to do so. However, after listening to Katie's presentation about this tool and reading your blog post, I must say that Evernote seems pretty wonderful.
You included several ways in which Evernote could be beneficial to teachers and I definitely think I could use this tool in the future. It is always helpful to be able to create and store different items in the same place, so using Evernote for this seems useful. One aspect of Evernote I really enjoyed learning about was it's ability to send email reminders. Even though most people have smartphones with this capability, I thought it was a pretty cool feature. I think it could also help those who have Internet access but do not have a device that can send reminders.
Thanks for the ideas about using Evernote in the classroom. I really wish they would get it going for Linux. And that reminder thing sounds great. I really need something like it. Especially in the MAC!
ReplyDelete