Explain Everything

I received a forwarded e-mail with a question about Evernote, simply because I am someone who uses Evernote, and I have researched it a bit for PD demo at our school. I don't exactly know all the ins and outs, especially with the iPad, so I looked online for the answer. The question was about sharing a link for a note, which apparently one can do on a computer but not on the iPad, where the sharing option is limited to notebooks.

So then, because one of our "assignments" this summer is to make a demonstration video with either the Explain Everything or Show Me app, I decided to get in some of my practice on the iPad by showing in a visual format what I had just learned about sharing notebooks .

I had been to a short demonstration of Explain Everything, but even if I had not, I think I still could have figured out how to use it, because it's pretty intuitive. The longest part of the process was probably taking my screenshots, but once I had my camera roll ready to go, it was a fairly quick job to pull up a shot for each slide, record and draw. The actual processing of the video took some minutes, a good time for (as suggested by the EE people) a "screen break."

I like it! Now I'll be thinking about how I can apply this application to my curriculum.

Evernote

Nothing to facilitate learning like agreeing to "bone up" to present the intermediate version of an app that I've been using in "beginner" fashion. But the more I learn about Evernote, the more I like it.

Mostly I just type lots of notes -- short and long -- things I want to remember and have accessible from any device. Books and movies people recommend. Notes about students to have on hand if I talk to parents. Agenda items for meetings. I haven't been interested in saving website articles that way, because I find Diigo to work quite well for the volume of links I save.

But with the iPad and the ability to take photos and record audio, more possibilities are opened up. I'm pretty impressed at how well the search function works, even finding words within photos of text or of my worst handwriting. Perhaps I will be finding new uses for Evernote.

Decisions, decisions

As we move from PC to iPad in our school, I have some things to figure out in terms of organization. I've been using One Note for all of my meetings and Evernote for just about every other note I type. I think there's a way to keep using One Note, and to sync it to all my devices. Should I learn that, or just stick everything in Evernote now?

We will be storing in the cloud, and Dropbox is the place that's been hyped around here so far. But Google just came out with Google Drive, and we're doing lots more Google. Would it be simpler to keep it in the family, so to speak?

I'll be making decisions about calendars. We have recently added a school Google calendar, and that's where my class calendars will go in the fall. If I keep the separate one I have in my personal (already existing) account, will I risk double-booking myself? I've already done that once, and we've barely begun. It's easy to switch from one calendar to another, but will I remember to do that? Maybe it's just as well to keep everything in one place.

It's going to be an interesting year, on many levels.