Hi, I'm Aaron Quigley, and welcome to another edition of Teacher Tips. This week, we're going to talk about how we can take all this countless paperwork that comes across teachers' desks, and organize it using the program Evernote. If you're not familiar with Evernote, I recommend taking some time to check out Up and Running with Evernote, by David Rivers, on the lynda.com website. He has two different courses, one for Mac users and Window users. In today's presentation, I'll be using Evernote on a Mac. As educators, there's a lot of information that we need to constantly organize. We have lesson plans and papers to grade.

We have documents for our school. We also have ideas that we'd like to keep track of for implementing next year. Today what we're going to do is talk about how we can take all of this stuff and roll it into a nice convenient place that will allow us to organize ourselves, create the ability to search all of our forms and documents as well as categorize the various documents we deal with on a daily basis. Here in Evernote I've already created a very simple teacher account. I've gone through and I've set up various notebooks. To add a notebook you simply click on the Add New Notebook function. And maybe I want to have a different notebook that's for field trip organization.

(NOISE) Now, inside of each of these notebooks we can organize notes. Notes can be anything that you have digitally on your computer, including webpages. A note could be a lesson plan document that you want to upload. Or it could be a Word document or PowerPoint presentation that your students turned in. Using Evernote as an educator there's a few best practices to allow us to streamline our day to day classroom activities. The first I'd like to talk about is how we can use Evernote to organize and categorize websites that we deal with on a daily basis.

I'm going to up my web browser, and here I have two different tabs open with two websites that I probably want to have access to. One is the Common Course state initiative website?And the other is the NSTA, or the National Science Teachers Association website. As a science teacher I'm constantly moving in out of the science standards, yet I need to keep in mind the Common Core State Standards as well. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and that both of these websites to my Evernote account. I can do that by clicking on the small icon next to their web address. Here I can click and drag that website to the elephant in the upper icon bar and go ahead and release.

You'll notice that it added this web link box, and now I can go ahead and click Save To Evernote. I'm going to do the same thing for the NSTA website, grab the web link, drag it up to the Evernote elephant and go ahead and release and then click Save To Evernote. Back in Evernote, when I click on the Notes tab, I now see that I have two websites that are there. I can go ahead and change the title for these by double-clicking on the title. This first one I'm going to type NSTA. Let me take a look at the second note, and I'll type CCSS.

And now what I can do, is I can categorize these links by adding tags to them. At some point in time, I might have hundreds of websites built into Evernote. So what I'd like to do is be able to search for some tags to quickly pull up these websites. Up here, where it says Click To Add Tags, I'm going to click, and I'm going to go ahead and type standards. I'm also going to click right next to standards, and I'm going to type, common core. So now if I went to the Search Notes function and I just started typing something like standards, I could see that the Standards tag comes up.

And inside the Standards tag I have one note, which is my Common Core State Standards. I'm going to go ahead and remove the search field so I can go ahead and categorize and add tags to the NSTA one, as well. Now these are standards as well. But these standards are science, so I'm going to add standards and then I'll add science. So I know have the NST note categorized with both standards and science so if I decide to search for it in the future, I can easily find what I'm looking for.

Now that I have these two notes categorized, what I'd like to do is go ahead and organize them into the appropriate notebooks. I'm just going to choose one. Drag it over to the Notebook section. Wait for it to open up my various notebooks. And then I'll go ahead and just categorize them. I think these can go in just my regular teachers notebook. Since I will use them as a teacher. So, now if I come to the Notebook section, and I click on the Teachers Notebook. I can see that I have two different notes in there. Both show that they are weblinks and I have access to the common course state standards and the NSTA standards.

Let's go ahead and head back to notebooks and this time let's go into educational ideas. As teachers, we come across a lot of educational ideas that may not be applicable to our current classes but we may want to think about taking the summer to really research them and implement them the following year. Here's a great way to store that information until you're ready to use it. I'm going to go and create a new note in educational ideas. I'm going to title this note new lesson plan. Now if I wanted to and I had this new lesson plan just in my mind, could go ahead and just type out all the information that I'd like.

But I'd actually found online a lesson plan template that I'd like to use. So what I'm going to do is use the attach file button in the righthand corner and I'm going to select that for my desktop.Here's my science lesson plan template. I'll go ahead and click Open. And now I have a attachment to this note that I can reference the following year. Further, what I'm going to do is start using reminders inside of my notes. To do this, I'll click on this small Reminder icon. And I'm going to go ahead and add a date. I would like to be reminded at the end of the schoolyear, let's say, June 15th, to come back and review this file.

So I'm going to go ahead and click away from that. I'm going to say, yes, please email me on the day that notes are due. And I now have a reminder set up so at the end of the school year, when the summer starts, I'll receive an email telling me to check out this new science lesson plan template. In addition to website and documents, sometimes we need to organize lists and to-do items as a teacher. Let's go ahead and access this new notebook called Field Trip Organization. Here, what I'd like to do is to create a checklist that I can use every single time I have a field trip. I'm simply going to create a new note in my field trip organization. I'm going to title this note, field trip planner.

(SOUND) So when I'm planning a field trip, there's several things that I need to do. I need to make sure that I arrange buses. Order student lunches, print permission slips, print class rosters, so I can take attendance on the field trip. And then contact parents for chaperones.Now, because these are to-do items, what I'd like to do is go ahead and add a check box for each individual item. So I'll go ahead and place my cursor right next to the text. I will come up to the navigation bar, and click the Check Box icon to add a check box in front of each one of these elements.

So when I pull up this note, I can choose to make changes to the note by simply checking off various items as I move through this field trip planning process. Furthermore, I want to set the due date for this particular field trip. To do that, I'm going to go and click on my schedule icon.I'm going to add a date, and I want to have all this stuff done by next week. So I'm just going to click the In a Week button. I've now automatically created a reminder that will show up at the top of my field trip organization folder. So even if I had a hundred different notes in here, the minute I open this folder, I would automatically see this field trip reminder at the top left-hand corner.

Furthermore, I want to be able to search and find this field trip plan in the future. So I'm going to go ahead and add some tags to it. Lets call this field trip. And we'll add another tag of checklist. So in the future I can search for checklists and find a variety of checklists that I'vecreated or I can search for field trip and this will also show up in that search. However, if I also search field trip checklist very specifically then this field trip planner will show up and probably be fairly high in my search list.

This way I can quickly pull this note back up. And reuse this note every single time I have a field trip. At this point, we've talked about how we can use Evernote to organize websites, to organize information that comes across our desks, as well as to create checklists and reminders for future use. The next step, is to talk about how we can use Evernote during our actual lessons.

Evernote is a great application as is. However there are additional add on applications you can use to get even more out of Evernote. To access this, let's go ahead and click on the trunk icon on the left hand side of our Evernote account. Here you can see a variety of applicationsthat are designed to enhance the Evernote experience. One of my absolute favorite applications is at the very bottom. And its called Skitch. Skitch allows us to take a screen capture of anything on our monitor and add graphic interactions on top of it. We can use Skitch to create dynamic PowerPoint slides as well as student handouts and even informational photos for a gallery walk.

Let's go ahead and take a look at how we can use Skitch in the classroom. Here I've got Skitch open in my computer. What I'm really viewing at this particular point is inside of Skitch I can see Evernote notes. I have a very particular folder that Skitch created inside of Evernote called Skitch. Anything I place in that folder, I can automatically open up in the Skitch file. In addition, I can choose to add notes directly to Evernote from Skitch. Right now what we're going to do is to create a PowerPoint slide for our students, to allow them to quickly get set up with the learning management system. To do that, I'm going to use a screen capture.

Here in my web browser I have a student sign-up sheet. I would like to give students some information on how they should sign up for this particular learning management system, including what the group code is. To do this I'm going to to go back to Skitch, at the very topI'm going to choose to do a Full Screen Capture. When I clicked Full-Screen, Skitch automatically took a picture of everything behind the Skitch application. So here in Skitch now I have a screenshot of the Edmodo home page with a student sign-up box. What I'd like to do now is add some information for students to know how I'd like them to sign up. The first thing I'm going to do is choose a color.

Let's choose this red color. I think it'll stand out well on the Edmodo site. And I'm going to use this Arrow icon, and I'm just going to click and drag out an arrow. For my students to know where to put their group code. With the red still highlighted, I'm going to come to the text button. I'm going to go ahead and type in the code they need to enter which is xwildu. I can now click away from the text, come back to it, and position it into place. Now that it's positioned into place, I'm starting to realize it's not quite big enough. I want to make sure that students in the back of the room know exactly what code they need to enter into the group code section.

I'm going to click on the the small anchor point next to the text, and I'm just going to make it a little bit bigger. Now that I think it's the size I want, I'm going to go ahead and drag it back into place, so now I have the text that needs to be typed in, with an arrow showing where it goes.Now, furthermore, I don't want my students to put an email address in. This is going to be for a middle school class, and I try really hard to not use email with my middle school students. So over here, I have a variety of stamps that I can use. I'm going to select this one stamp that has the x on it and then I'm going to come over here to where it says e-mail and I'm just going to click to add this x.

Now furthermore, what I'd like to do is have the x point towards e-mail. So, where the plus sign's at, I'm going to click that and that will add a flag pointing towards the e-mail address. And then just to make sure all students on the same page, I'm going to click the text icon and I'm going to go ahead and type in Do not enter. I'd like to highlight a few of the other features inside of Skitch. I have the ability to draw circles, squares, shapes, and even rounded rectangles. So maybe I want to highlight that this is what they're going to fill out. I can go ahead and draw a circle on it and move it into position.

I can go ahead and slide this PowerPoint back down. The way I'm moving the slide around by the way, is I hold down the spacebar and you'll notice my cursor becomes this small little white glove. That then allows me to click and drag around so that I can reposition the page where I'd like it. In addition to drawing circles and shapes, I also can choose a marker. Where I can just free write. So, let's say that I wanted to circle the word welcome. What I can also do is I can choose to blur out items in the slide. I'm going to come down here and click this pixelated icon.

Let's say maybe I don't want watch demo visible to students, so I'm going to go ahead and just drag this box over it, and you'll notice that it blurs out that text. At the very bottom, I have the opportunity to select what part of the slide I want visible. I probably don't need the whole webpage, I really just need students to focus on this section of the slide. So I go ahead and drag these anchor points into position. And then when I think it's right where I want it, I'll go ahead and click the Apply button. So at this point, Skitch has already gone through and created a new note, it has the graphic overlay on top of that note, and it's saved that note inside of Evernote.

I'm goinna go ahead and click on the Evernote icon up in the upper right-hand corner, and you'll notice that in Evernote I now have this new Skitch icon. I can go back to Evernote, export this particular note, and use it in my PowerPoint slides. Or print it out to hand to students as a reference. I hope you you enjoy using Skitch along with Evernote to create dynamic slides for your classroom. There's really endless possibilities of how you can use this with your students, and I encourage you to even get your students using Skitch and Evernote themselves. I hope to see you next week with the next teacher tip.