Use Evernote to organize teaching resources

The more I use Evernote, the more I love it! I wrote about using Evernote to help students acquire a second language before and now I encourage teachers to use Evernote to organize their teaching resources. 

The powerful secrete tool is to use Evernote extension, Web Clipper. This extension can be easily downloaded for your web browser from Evernote website. What makes it different from using bookmarks or dropbox? I used to bookmark the websites, but the problem was that I rarely visited them again. Dropbox was good to create folders and save files. However, I did not find a way to save website pages. Evernote web clipper allows users to save anything encountered on the internet, including articles, website pages, PDF files, videos, photographs, and so on. Whatever you’ve captured will be automatically synced to the designated Evernote notebooks. Here is one example how I organized resources related to a Pop Culture unit. 

Benefits 

• Being able to save anything from the internet allows teachers to store authentic materials in a more organized way.
• I can use the ‘Presentation’ function and show students the note through the projector. Additionally, I can also annotate the note and share it with students.
• Use the ‘Search notes’ and ‘Tag’ functions to find relevant notes in a very short time.
• When I save notes from a website, it also saves the source of the resource, which makes referencing easy if needed.
• Titles of notes together with images are clearly displayed in the notebook, which provides a good visual tool when planning lessons.
• If needed, I can easily share the URL with students or simply e-mail the notes to students.
• If there is more than one teacher teaching the same subject, I can e-mail the notebooks to my colleague, which makes collaboratively planning easy.
• Being an Evernote Premium user, I am able to download notes for offline use/planning on my iPhone and iPad.

There are so many great functions about Evernote. If you can spend time to explore it, I bet you will love it!