Teaching is a profession that is becoming increasingly accountable and driven but more and more demands for paperwork. This means that there is an increasing work load on teachers, as they are being asked to do more and more, without any of their other duties being taken away. While the IEU will continue to push back against this workload, there are a few tools that teachers might be able to use to streamline their work. One of these is Evernote. Read on to find out how one teacher uses this digital tool to simplify their workload.
What is Evernote?
For those who don’t know, Evernote is a digital organiser. It’s far from the only one of its type - you might have heard of things like SimpleNote or OneNote. They all have many features in common, with some advantages and disadvantages, but the ony that I am most familiar with, and will be talking about especially, is Evernote.
Simply put, Evernote allows you to file and store all kinds of documents, files, links and other items in a sort of digital filing cabinet. You can create as many different cabinets as you like (Evernote calls them notebooks) and also as many different files in those notebooks as you could imagine (these are called notes). And then you can add tags to all of these notes that allows you to search and find them years later - so you’re looking for a lesson to teach to Year 7 about A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Just type ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ into the search bar and up will pop every note containing a reference to that play.
It’s important to note that Evernote is capable of storing much more than paper or digital documents. It can store whole webpages - or just excerpts from webpages. It can store scanned documents (try using an app called Scannable for this). It can store clips and emails - and even better, you can email directly to Evernote, and it will store the email as part of a note.
What can I do with it?
Of course, this is just touching the surface of what Evernote is capable of. Let me explain the way that I used it in the classroom. Firstly, I have a notebook called ‘To Do’. In that, I create notes of each week of term, and I add details of what I need to do that week - whether it’s calling parents, or writing reports or developing assessment tasks. I can also add meetings and other events into this weekly planner.
I also keep a notebook for each of my classes. For example, 9.3 English has a notebook, and so does 11 Ancient History. In these notebooks, I keep my own planning documents, my rolls, my mark books (assuming I am not using the school system, or I want my own version) as well as my programs and pieces of evidence for student work. Evernote lets me annotate and mark up these documents very easily, so I can make comments on my program as I work on it. I can also store all kinds of useful documents and articles that might help in my planning later.
One of the best features of this is that my Evernote notebooks are available on all of my devices - from phone to tablet to laptop - so I can access them wherever I am.
And finally, Evernote has a share feature - which means I can share my notebooks with my colleagues - and they can add their own materials, which means we can have faculty or stage level documents available to all members of staff - all the time - which makes it a potentially very powerful collaboration tool.
