Teacher Organization With Evernote

Teachers juggle so many bits and pieces of information. When I was teaching, my desk was a flurry of post-it notes reminding me of a student’s absence, make-up quiz grades, or to write a letter of recommendation for one of my seniors. Just as often as not, the notes stuck to the bottom of my shoe like toilet paper, they were so plentiful. As the number of post-its grew, I felt my shoulders tense and the chaos in my head get louder.
One of my favorite teacher applications for managing the minutiae of teaching and calming the chaos is Evernote.

Teachers are content creators. We write lesson plans, IEPs, syllabi, assessments, the list is endless. And, sure, our schools have Drive or Atlas or some other storage system for lesson plans. But what happens if you leave the school or change positions and lose access to that content? 

That’s why I always create IN Evernote, and then transfer to whatever application my school requires. Evernote is just what it says: it’s forever. No matter what my email address, school address, or job title is, Evernote stays with me. And so does all the content I develop for my classrooms, all my meeting notes, all my lists, syllabi, and collections.

Furthermore, Evernote’s organization system allows me to merge my Real Life and Teacher Life. Evernote allows users to group things they want to remember in notebooks. So I have a notebook for Meal Planning and a notebook with a lesson plan for each class I teach. I can create as many notebooks with as many notes as I like, and stack and organize them however my brain sees them. The whole system is searchable so if I file something in a weird place, Evernote helps me track it down.

If you are taking notes in a meeting, either IEP, parent, or just faculty meeting, Evernote has a way to include Action Items right in your notes to help you keep track of your to-do’s. I also find the Web Clipper feature helpful if I find an article I want to share with my students, I just clip it from my web browser and I can save it directly into the notebook in Evernote that it applies to. 

Ultimately, Evernote is a tool that helps me stay organized, helps me keep all of my content and lesson plans safe and organized and lets me remember all of the bits and pieces that flow through my brain in a day. And it’s far more reliable than my scattered post-it notes system…