BY SHARON ALLIE

MA TESOL GRADUATE STUDENT, AZUSA PACIFIC UNIVERSITY

FOR TESL 501: LANGUAGE LEARNING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Evernotefor Educators

What is Evernote?

Organize information, and store it both on and off line.

“Capture”, attach and store images, videos, web links, even handwritten notes, to designated “binders” or notebooks.

Tag information for searching ease.

Create ‘to do’ lists and link due dates to your email.

► View your material anywhere, on any computer or device, including smartphones and tablets.

► Synch your account on all your devices.

Evernote is a free tool that helps you “remember everything” (Evernote, 2014).

Why Evernote for teachers?Because teachers are:

Busy people who need to find their resources quickly.

Multi-taskers who plan a great deal (e.g. lessons, meetings, student conferences).

Organizers of a great deal of information and paper (e.g. lesson plans, handouts, homework assignments, meeting notes, inspirational ideas)

How can Evernote help?

Evernote will:

Store uploaded lesson plans into “binders” to reduce paper clutter.

Store ‘to do’ lists and send reminders by email.

Share handouts with students from any device, and from anywhere.

► Take conference or meeting notes and share them with others.

► Make your information accessible, wherever you travel or teach.

There’s more… In a language learning classroom, record

students’ pronunciation for testing & analysis, and store audio files in class “binders” or shared student folders.

Snap a photo of a well done white board and store it in the lesson’s binder for next time.

Create a notebook or group of notebooks (a stack) for each class.

Create individual student portfolios “to observe [students’] work as they [create] it, through shared notebooks (Webster, 2013).

Develop a notebook to share with the substitute teacher (Skrabut, 2014).

What does it look like?

• Notebooks are the centerpiece of Evernote. This is where all of the bits of information you have can be organized, tagged and stored.

• There are 2 notebooks in this example.

• In the notebook called Basic English 2 there are 2 items on the checklist below.

Drawbacks of Evernote New technology can be overwhelming.

May initially be time consuming to load enough information into Evernote to make it useful for archiving and searching.

There is a download limit of 60 MB per month without a paid subscription (Meador, 2014).

Shared documents can only be edited when one or both of the users have a premium Evernote account (Meador, 2014).

Evernote is “massive and can handle everything… [however,] the massiveness of Evernote is also its downfall (Klosowski, 2013). The process to take down a quick note (opening the app, finding the correct notebook, typing the note, and tagging it) may be considered too timely, and thus it may be faster with pen and paper for some.

With all it’s power, Evernote can sometimes be slow when it performs searches on your data (Cook, 2011).

Conclusion

Evernote is a powerful organizing and note-taking tool. It is not designed to be tip-toed into, as it probably won’t be useful until a good quantity of information is entered as notes, notebooks, or stacks.

It may be best for those who plan to store a significant amount of information.

Once you get the hang of it, Evernote can be very useful.

References► Cook, D. M. (2011). Retrieved from

http://appculture.net/evernote-the-best-note-taking-app/

► Evernote. (2014). Retrieved from https://evernote.com/

► Meador, D. (2014). http://teaching.about.com/od/tech/fr/A-Review-Of-Evernote.htm

► Skrabut, S. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/skrabut/evernote4teachers

► Webster, A. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.edudemic.com/the-evernote-experiment/

► Klosowski, T. (2013, September 25). Retrieved from http://lifehacker.com/note-taking-styles-compared-evernote-vs-plain-text-vs-1379778864

Images: Evernote. (2014). Retrieved from https://

play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evernote Evernote– Remember Everything. (). Retrieved from https://freeallsoftwares.com Ipads 4 Learning. (nd). Retrieved from http://

ipads4learning.global2.vic.edu.au/tag/apps/ Remember Everything. (nd). Retrieved from mashe.hawksey.info Tech Tutors. (nd). Retrieved from http://blogs.scholastic.com/tech_tutors/weblogs/