Element 12: Helping Students Record and Represent Knowledge

Element 12 from Marzano's Teaching Framework talks about the use of digital academic notebooks.  There are many products out there that work well in developing a digital academic notebook for taking notes, outlines and reflections.  One product I want to feature is Evernote.  I am an avid Evernote user and have used Evernote since Feb of 2012.

At its simplest form, Evernote is a digital notebook allowing you to collect multiple forms of digital content, from text to photos, to web links, to document files, to audio recordings, and more.  It is a powerful indexer of information.

With the ability to categorize your content into separate notebooks and label each note with linkable tags, you can thoroughly organize your digital stuff.

This is a great tool for students to use when creating their own digital academic notebooks.  Evernote also is integrated in the iPad operating system.  Users can save content from their Safari web browser straight to their desired Evernote notebook.

Because Evernote is a cloud-based product, users will be able to access their content from almost any device or computer.  Evernote is very multi-platform.  As a result of this feature, users (students) will have to create their own account using an email account as verification, so make sure you check with your Administrators first before allowing students in your class to start creating accounts.

To learn more of the potential and the power of Evernote, YouTube is literally LOADED full of thousands of very helpful tutorials.  Goes to show it is favored by many, many people.

Links:
Online Evernote account
Evernote app on iTunes

Student Academic Notebooks

While reading Robert Marzano's book, The Art and Science of Teaching, he refers to a student tool he calls an academic notebook, where students can record their ideas.  Taking from that, one of my favorite products for recording ideas and pretty much doing "almost" anything when it comes to digital procuring, is Evernote.  Evernote has grown to become a hugely used in app world, business world as well as the edu world.  There are dozens, upon dozens of creative ideas and solutions for how Evernote can become a powerful and amazing productivity tool for note/thought taking, image collecting, web bookmarking, document saving and more.  Student can benefit from this powerful tool as well as their academic notebook for collecting just about anything digitally.

Evernote, also, has a very handy flashcard maker from their app Peek (FREE), which allows users to create simple flashcards for studying by using the notes from their Evernote notebooks.

Below is a video demo of what Evernote can do.

Evernote Peek