Keeping Productive and Organised using Evernote
Brief Note: I’m writing this because I’m a giant fan of Evernote and think it can be really a useful tool for teachers and departments, allowing them to keep organised. This is in no way an official endorsement and Evernote have not asked me or paid me to write this so you can be sure it’s an honest account from a new teacher as to how Evernote has helped me stayed organised and be more productive. But if, after reading, you’re interested in trying Evernote, you can get a free month of Evernote Premium (worth about a fiver) for free using this link:
The summer holidays have been a great chance for me to catch up on reading and think of new ideas for my planning for next year. The internet, and in particular Twitter, is jam-packed with useful resources, blog posts and articles that can inspire your future work, but keeping it all organised can be a real pain. I’m a compulsive hoarder of things, so without some organisational system, I would quickly drown under a mountain of random links and documents. I gave a small departmental CPD session during my PGCE on using Evernote as a teacher, explaining how I keep things organised and I thought it would be useful to share the idea further.
In brief, Evernote is a piece of online notebooking software that allows you to store pretty much anything (text, links, files) in designated Notebooks. The beauty for me is that the Notebooks are accessible across multiple devices, regardless of their operating system (by using either the app or the Evernote website). I’ve found it really useful to have a universal app between my Apple and Windows devices that I can use seamlessly. It means I can bookmark things on-the-go on my smartphone, putting articles in a sensible Notebooks which are then available on all of my bigger devices. It saves me having multiple locations of possible bookmarks, keeping everything in one place. Having a mixture of links, files, little notes etc. all in one place was a revolution to me when I started using it during my PhD.
Evernote has a simple hierarchical structure of Notes, Notebooks and Notebook Stacks. In the image below, the left hand side shows all of the Notebooks in my ‘Teaching’ Notebook Stack (I also have other Notebook Stacks for my PGCE work, my previous Physics research and for other things that I need to keep organised in my life). In the selected notebook — SLOP (Shed Loads of Practice, a phrase pinched from Adam Boxer) — are all of the Notes that I’ve made over time, containing screenshots of Twitter conversations, blogs and resources that people have kindly made available, influencing the way I view the creation of SLOP resources for whenever I’m making them.
Rather than just bookmarking the links to blogs, articles and websites, Evernote saves the text of the entire article, making it searchable for the future. This allows you to find all Notes that contain a particular keyword whenever you want to search for things you’ve previously seen/read. For instance, I can search for ‘Dual-Coding’ and it’ll list all of the Notes than contain that phrase from either all of my Notebooks or a specific one if I want to narrow down my search.
You can see that there are Notebooks for a huge variety of topics, from ‘Blogs’, ideas about ‘SEND Support’, possible ‘Subscriptions’ to services that could help me or my students or news stories about teaching or Physics. Right now, when planning, my Notebooks on the individual topics within Physics allow me to find all of the amazing resources, videos and demos that I’ve seen (and shamelessly pinched) throughout the year, all in one place. I know that whenever I see a new idea on the internet, using Evernote allows me to safely squirrel it away for later, so that it’s in a place that makes it easier for future-me to find.
I also used Evernote a lot during my PGCE for bookmarking research and storing my own evidence for my portfolio in an organised manner (Chris Baker has written an amazing blog post about the use of Evernote for PGCE students here).
The most common way I use it is finding things on Twitter that I can bookmark and refer to later. By having the app on my smartphone, I can simply share the article to one of my Evernote Notebooks. In the example below I’ve found a blog post by the excellent Pritesh Raichura which I’ve saved to my Blogs folder (and I’ve later copied it to my Curriculum folder too). The article is then saved and searchable so if, at a later date, I search the term ‘Sequencing’, then his article will appear in the results list.
The adding of tags to your individual Notes can be an extra layer of organisation. I use tags very sparingly (there’s a lot of scope for me to use them more effectively), but I currently use them to bookmark items that I need to ‘DOWNLOAD’ when I get the chance, or blogs or articles that I’ve considered to be ‘KEY’ for me to read when I get a chance. I then just look at the Notes under these tags (DOWNLOAD and KEY) when I get a bit more time to read them through or when I’m on a device where it’s easier to download them.
A further huge benefit of Evernote comes when you share Notebooks within a department. I introduced Evernote to my research group during my PhD and it certainly helped us to keep journal articles and data files in a structure that allowed us all to access them from our different institutions without the need for lots of emails back and forth. Within a school, I could share my Notebooks on the individual topics within Physics with other staff members so we can all add ideas for ways to enhance learning in a given topic. For instance, my Notebook on Circuits contains blog posts on ideas for teaching circuits (from e=mc2andallthat), great videos for visualising circuits, and possible demos that I’ve seen other people use from all corners of the internet. By sharing the Notebook, everyone within a department can easily contribute their findings when idly trawling the internet and make that time useful for everyone. I’m happy to share any of my notebooks with people to begin with if you’re interested. I’m a massive #cogscisci fanboy so there’ll be a lot of stuff in there from Rosalind (Ruth) Walker, Adam Boxer, Pritesh Raichura, Deep Ghautura, Niki Kaiser et al. They all share amazing resources, write brilliant blogs and point you in the direction of useful research. You can send me a message on Twitter if you fancy seeing one of the Notebooks.
There are also some excellent tie-in apps such as the Web Clipper for computer browsers that gives extra options for clipping things to your Notebooks over the mobile options shown above. There also the brilliant Scannable app that allows you to scan documents using your phone such that the document is isolated from the background and enhanced to become a .pdf file rather than simply an image. I used this an awful lot when organising evidence for my PGCE portfolio.
As always, there are some cons. In particular, the cost of Evernote Premium is £45 per year. But, using this link, you can have a month’s trial of Premium for free: https://www.evernote.com/referral/Registration.action?sig=6f148d74f10ae11a2f58bef294ba213e07ece63128d2ac84e1dfe5bba7e22a5c&uid=53843919
Whilst there is a free version of Evernote, I think the Premium version has enough additional pros (significantly larger upload limit, an unlimited number of synced devices, the ability to annotate .pdfs as well as the ability to search within .pdfs) that it warrants the cost for me over the course of the year. I’ve been paying for Evernote ever since I first got it, and I don’t regret the cost at all.
If there are any parts of Evernote that you’d like more advice on, or if you’d like me to give more detail about how I use Evernote, let me know and I’ll add more to this article! Thanks for reading!
