Evernote

If you are not already using Evernote, I have a few personal and educational uses that work for me, and may be beneficial to you as well!

Step 1:  Go to www.evernote.com and create a free account.  On my personal laptop, I downloaded the "webclipper" tool that puts a little elephant icon in my tool bar, so I can click it to capture screenshots and save to my Evernote "Notebooks."

Step 2:  Decide what kind of "Notebooks" you want to create.  I just created a new account that will apply directly to my new grade level, so all of the notebooks I create will relate to the units I want to create for my new fifth grade class.

Do you ever see recipes on Facebook that look amazing, but you just don't want to "share" them in order to save to your wall?  I created a Notebook in Evernote and named it "Recipes Captured Online."  It's not unlike pinning to your recipe page on Pinterest.  I open the Recipes Captured Online notebook and click the + New Note button.  I title the note the title of the recipe, then copy and paste from Facebook.  Voila!  Captured for my future browsing or cooking attempts.  

EVERNOTE - FOR UNIT PLANNING

Teachers, I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me before, but Evernote is making it SO much easier for me to wrap my mind around unit planning.  The first unit I am working on for the beginning of the school year is a 5th grade literature unit based on the novel Out of My Mind, by Sharon Draper.  As part of this unit, I will be doing an assistive technology project.  As I browse the web finding resources, one way I'm finding to organize my data is by copying and pasting into my applicable Evernote files.  If you are anything like me, when you start to Google your topic, you will most likely come across topics and great blogs and sites that will help you in other areas.  To avoid losing those great resources, simply create more Notebooks and save everything that looks like it truly will be helpful in the future.  Just take the time to organize them as you go.  

Once I have a nice assortment of resources in my various notebooks, I'm ready to refer to them easily to help me as I write my unit plans.  This will help me to avoid the distraction of browsing online at the time I need to just focus on the writing, with the resources close at hand.

TAGGING

If you know you are going to be adding a lot of notes, it will be helpful to find just the right post later on by tagging your notes as you go.  I put any and all keywords I might later think of to describe the material in each note.  

This is what my Evernote page looked like after just thirty minutes of browsing and saving to my notebooks:

OTHER USES

• Save a copy of all your receipts.  Add the Evernote app to your Smartphone, take a photo of your receipts, store them in a Notebook and tag as personal, school-related, or other.  
• Create a Notebook for each student in your class.  Save work samples, audio files, and conference notes.  There is a feature to email directly from Evernote, so you can share work with parents quickly and easily while you are conferring with students.
• 10 Tips for Teachers Using Evernote
• Prezi to illustrate features of Evernote