Main Features: Evernote is tool that serves as a digital notebook. You can save word documents, power point presentations, videos, and web links all in one place. An additional feature is that is portable. You can sync devises so that they can all access your Evernote account. This means if you find a good resource on your home computer, you can access it on your smart phone and school computer. You would then put a tag on the file so you can find it later (i.e. labeling a video ‘Science Experiment’). You can also easily share files with friends, colleagues, and classmates for collaboration.
Level of Difficulty: This tool is something that comes naturally to young people. For adults and children who are already used to working with Word documents, youtube, and other internet resources, there would probably be little to learn. It is only a matter of saving it in the Evernote tool. I think it might be more challenging for those who are not so media savvy, particularly older teachers. If they are struggling with more common tools like Excel and Outlook for email, it might be a tall task to learn and use Evernote.
Classroom Applicability: Evernote is the kind of tool that will make the spiral notebooks we grew up with obsolete. Students can take notes and share them with the class. One example on the website for Evernote has the teacher posting lecture notes to a place the class can view, therefore the students don’t need to focus on writing notes and can just focus on the lesson. It is a way for the teacher to disseminate information to the students, but also for the students to work together and share information they find.
Conclusion: This tool is worth learning because it is a step towards making education more interactive for the students. Instead of being passive recipients of information, they can find and share information just like the teacher does. As long as the resources are available for enough computers in the school, and the teacher has enough computer skills to use it, Evernote will be a great tool. I think everyone in this online class would have the ability to get the most out of it. However, I would not recommend this tool to teachers who are not computer savvy.
I think this tool is great! It is wonderful that you can access this tool from any device. I frequently have to send myself things so that I can open them on another computer. I also like that you can organize the various media documents (Word, videos, etc.) and label them in a way that works for you. I think it is great that teachers can upload the notes so that, as you mentioned, students don't have to focus on taking notes. Instead, they can focus on the lesson and write down what the teacher is saying aside from the notes. Also, students can share their notes. If a student is absent from class, they will be able to easily access the teacher's notes or those of their classmates.
ReplyDeleteThis is a cool tool. The drive right now seems to create free websites that store things, so users can access them from any computer. There is google docs to upload and share files. I use amazon.com's wish list to store a list of books I want. There is diigo and xmarks that can store websites favorites. There is drop box that can store files. There is icloud to store music and contacts. This is a big weight off everyones shoulders. We dont have to worry about losing work when our computer crashes, or if we lose our usb drive, or if our phone dies, because all the info is stored somewhere else. The bad thing is the privacy factor. It is like we are moving our file cabinets out of our home to free up room but the place we will now store it as unfettered access to our files.
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