Part 3: Evernote (My 1st Year as a 1-to1 Teacher)

June 23, 2015:

For research in English class, Evernote has been insanely useful. It has completely freed this teacher from the tyranny of piles of index cards, etc. Full disclosure, I actually pay for the premium version to use in my personal life, but all features discussed here are part of the free accounts.

Evernote has many applications, but at its most basic, it is a filing cabinet to store and organize information in the cloud. There is an app for Evernote. There are a number of associated apps like Penultimate and Scannable. There is also an "Evernote web clipper" which is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows users to "clip" articles from the web directly into Evernote. Also, there is another plugin called "Clearly" that cleans up and simplifies the formatting of a web page to make it easier to read. And there is much, much more.

For detailed information on how this teacher used Evernote in class this year, keep reading . . . 

Below is a screen shot of an example notebook I shared with my classes this year. You can view the notebook here as well. The assignment was to write a researched, argumentation essay on a given topic. I chose "Is diet soda bad for you?" as my example issue. On the left are the "notes" that I have placed inside my "notebook" that is labeled "Lainhart_Diet Soda Arg Essay." On the right, is the display of my first note. I had the students label each note as the source it came from and include their MLA citation and web link in the note.

Once students made their notebooks (I had them use my "Last Name_Topic" naming rules for their notebooks), they shared their notebooks with me through Evernote's "Work Chat" function. You can read about how to use that here. When the students shared their notebooks with me, I got a notification in my Evernote account. I could then organize their notes into folders by class, and I was good to go. Then any new information the students added to those notebooks, I would automatically be able to view. Students were also able to share notebooks with each other or share individual notes with each other, if they happened to be working on the same project.

(Because it's designed for adults, there is not any kind of content monitoring of chats. With high school students this year, I did not have any instances where that was an issue, but it's not impossible.)

Also, if we were working in class, students could "work chat" with me (if I was at my computer) as a kind of back channel communication. I found that some of the quieter students were making good use of this as it gave them a subtle way to ask questions. 

To summarize: students were able to use Evernote to organize their research in a place they could reach from any Internet connected device. Once they shared their notebooks with me, they stayed shared with me, so that I could monitor progress easily. Students could also make other notebooks and not share them aka use them for their own purposes, which I encouraged. It cut down on piles of papers and cards for both the teacher and the students, and it also provided some of the more "organization challenged" students more structure and less opportunity to lose their research as it was stored on the Internet for them.