Using Evernote (and Postach.io) to Manage Student Work
I've tinkered with student portfolios, VLEs and microblogging to manage student work - all to a lesser degree of effectiveness; either:
1. The learners reject the system (ie. Moodle) due to perceptions over it's "modernness"
OR
2. The learners embrace the system for it's novelty and "chat" functions (ie. Edmodo)
OR
3. Teachers like the idea (ie. microblogging) but just find the whole experience "bolt on"
OR
4. After initial success, both students and staff return to the lowest common denominator… Email
It's this return to email that I wanted to embrace, as it seems that everyone knows and likes email. It's stood the test of time.
So, how do I integrate email into my workflow for managing student work?
From Email to Evernote!
Every Evernote account has an associated email address (you can find it under Account Info). Creating a note is as simple as sending an email to that address.
Since anyone can send an email to the address, anyone can create a note in your Evernote account! And, with some simple Evernote-fu, you can use this to manage student work efficiently.
Here’s how to organize student work using Evernote and Email:
1. Create a new notebook (in this case - 12Phys1) to store incoming work from students...
2. Allow students to send an email of their work to your Evernote email address along with “@12Phys1" in the subject line to designate which notebook it will be sent to.Example: Subject Line: Hooke's Law - A Student @12Phys1
3. This will create a new note, in the 12Phys1 notebook, titled “Hooke's Law - A Student"…
Through this process, all the students in your class can use email to submit their work directly to your Evernote account.
Simple!
From Evernote to Postach.io!
Postach.io connects to your Evernote account so you can publish your notes to a web page. Here’s how:
2. Set a password on the blog so that only you and your students can gain entry (optional paid feature).
3. Name your new Postach.io notebook (in this case - “ClassBlog") and publish notes from it using the tag “published".
4. Students can now email their work to this new notebook’s (in as above), adding “#published" to the end of the subject line as a tag:
Example: Subject: “Lab Team #1" @ClassBlog #published
5. This will create a new note, in the ClassBlog notebook, titled “Physics Lab Team #1" with the "published" tag, AND
6. Postach.io will instantly publish the new note to the class blog (see below)
Students can now publish their work to the class blog and share what they’re doing with classmates and family.
Simple!
