Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Evernote: assessment, e-portfolio, notebook, organizer & more!



Evernote is a tool I use in the classroom to efficiently keep things organized.  For my teacher followers, I have outlined some uses for Evernote in the classroom in this post.  For parent followers, you can also download Evernote and use my assessment files to see what skills your child needs to acquire and to practice with them or to create your own digital collection of your child's work.  Evernote can also easily be used outside of education- checklists, to do lists and gathering information are just a few ideas! 
  
One of my favorite ways to use Evernote in the classroom is to create a collection of work samples and assessments for each of my Grade 1 students.  I use the collections as e-portfolios during conferences and also refer to them when writing report cards.  Older students could create a collection of work samples, media, research information, sources and references independently and/or with teacher guidance. 

I have an Evernote notebook titled Mrs Obach which contains templates for assessments and activities that I use regularly (see the links below for my assessment checklists).  Then, at the start of each year, I create a new "stack" and make a "notebook" for each student. When I assess students, I simply select my template and then choose "copy" and make a copy in the student's notebook.  I can quickly check off the skills students have mastered, make notes etc.  For example, all of the high frequency sight words for grade 1 are in a template that I can use to easily check off the words each student can read.  If a student is working on review words from Kindergarten or has advanced to the word list for Grade 2, I have templates ready to differentiate the assessment. 

What I really like about Evernote is the fact that it is accessible on my computer, phone or online.  So, if I assess a student at school, I can go home and bring up that same assessment to review while writing report card comments (and I don't have to carry home a bunch of notebooks!)

 Sometimes, I may want to include a photo of a student's work in his or her file.  With the Evernote app on my smartphone, I can quickly upload the sample for the student to share during his or her conference. If we're working on an activity at my SMARTboard, I can quickly capture the screen which shows student work and save the image to his or her notebook.  

Collaboration is also easy using Evernote.  When working with Mrs. Caldwell (for more great ideas, meet her at http://kinderdiva.blogspot.ca/ )  I use shared notebooks which we can both access and edit.  Notebooks could also be shared with colleagues, parents or other students.  I have shared links to my assessment checklists below - just another way to collaborate and save some of my teacher friends some time!   :)

Download Evernote at: http://evernote.com/download/

Read more about Evernote at: http://blog.evernote.com/

Shared Note for Literacy Place Grade 1 Review Words Checklist: Click Here

Shared Note for Literacy Place Grade 1 Sight Words Checklist: Click Here

Shared Note for Literacy Place Grade 2 Sight Words Checklist: Click Here

Shared Note for Grade 1 Counting Skills Checklist: Click Here

Shared Note for Number Words 0-20 Checklist: Click Here

Shared Note for Number Recognition 0-20 Checklist: Click Here

Shared Note for Number Recognition beyond 20 Checklist: Click Here


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