So this post was inspired by a colleague who emailed to ask me why I prefer the Evernote app over the Note Taking app that comes from Apple. In all of our admin meetings and committees, I’m always raving about how much I love having Evernote as a way of organizing my notes so it made sense that she would ask. So I figured in the age of blogging, why email her back (okay I still did) when I can share my thoughts with anyone who cares. So in point form, here’s what I love about Evernote:
Easy to Organanize by notes: Evernote makes it so easy to organize all of my notes. And I don’t just mean my work/school notes. I’m able to create notebooks for professional topics like PAC meetings, parent interviews, committee work as well as personal things recipes, wines I like and lists for going to the cabin.
Evernote has a search function: I am not the most organized of people. And back in the day I would have to go through pages of notes to find information on a particular student when talking with parents. With Evernote, I can simply search the student name and up pops all the notes I have on them. And while I haven’t used this enough, Evernote also allows users to tag their notes so they can find common notes easily. It allows me to be efficient with my time and actually sound like I know what I’m talking about.
Evernote is cloud-based: This is probably my favourite feature of Evernote. Being that I own a Macbook, iPad and iPhone I can’t express how handy it is that when I connect to the internet, all my notes are automatically synced between my devices. That means if I need notes on a particular student while I’m at the Board office, I can access them on my iPhone even though I took them on my laptop.
I can use multi-media in my notes: Evernote allows you to not only use text when creating notes, but also use pictures, sound recordings, web links, and attachments. This means that I can have a complete set of rich notes all in one place. For example, during the week when I’m collecting things for the West Langley Success Blog, I can take a picture of the event or learning activity and then write or record a few notes about what is going on. Then when I go to create the blog post at the end of the week, it’s all in one place. Another more important example of this feature is in the wine store. When we have a wine that we like, we can take a picture of the bottle and write a few pertinent notes about it. Then when we are in the liquor store trying to remember what it was called or what is looked like, out comes the iPhone.
Evernote is focused on education This is the area I have yet to tap into and am the most excited about. If I had a regular intermediate or middle school class, I would want to use Evernote with my students to help organize their notes. For the reasons above, I can see great potential for all of my students, particularly those with learning or organizational issues. At West Langley we have used Evernote Peek to help students study for tests. And as I follow other educators on Twitter, it seems to me that Evernote is making more and more updates that are focused on education and helping students be successful.
I know there are lots more advantages to Evernote. I would suggest you check the Evernote website for more great aspects of the app. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other great note-taking apps out there, but Evernote has everything I need to stay organized and then some. So a couple questions for Apple users:
1. What other note-taking app do you use and what do you think are the advantages of it?
2. If you use Evernote, what ways would you use it with students to help them be successful.