Last week, I posted at what you can do with Evernote. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to get hands-on with Evernote in the last few days and got a feel for how awesome it really is. Once you do get started with Evernote, you’ll wonder what you did without it.
Evernote in History Class
(Photo courtesy: Library of Congress)
Continuing on in the “Evernote for the Social Studies” series, today I wanted to take a look at how Evernote can help students in History class. For this post, I contacted a former student of mine and asked if she would be willing to take a few minutes with me and take a look at what Evernote could do for her in her History class.
Digitize and Organize your notes
As I sat down with her and we began to discuss what she was doing in her classes, she showed me some of the notes that she had taken in her class. Currently, she’s in 8th grade and taking a United States History class from Colonization period to the end of Reconstruction of the American Civil War. The notes had been done on loose-leaf notebook paper and she kept them in a folder specifically for that class. As we discussed the positives and negatives of taking and retaining notes that way, the one thing that concerned her was loosing her notes. Here’s where I showed her where Evernote could step in and take care of that problem. To start off with, we created a new notebook “US History Notes” in her Evernote account (age requirement is 13 yrs old for any users of Evernote, see the privacy policy). Using the Evernote app on her Ipod Touch, we took a snapshot of her notes:
She like the idea of creating a “notebook” specially for her US History class for quick and easy organization. What I also showed her as well was how Evernote can help her refresh on her notes and prepare for a test. On the notes above, we looked at Evernote’s search feature to quickly find needed notes. Once she took the snapshot of her notes, she would title them–i.e. Jamestown notes:
Notice how performing a search of “jamestown” in her Evernote notes came up with her Jamestown notes and how Evernote highlighted the searched term in yellow. As a side note, if you are a premium user you can also search for text in the image themselves.
At the end of our discussion of Evernote, she said she was going to try using Evernote for the next couple of weeks and see how it will help her. I’ll be updating everyone as she continues to use Evernote over the next few days. In her words, she classified Evernote as “cool”. Yes my fellow educators, Evernote will make your students say “cool”.
Staying up-to-date on current events with Evernote
The interesting part of history is that it does’t stop, history happens every day. If you plan on having your students keep up with current events throughout the school year, why not have them clip articles with Evernote? As my former student did for her history notes, have your students create a notebook in their Evernote account and name it something like “Current Events”. If they have the Evernote Webclipper installed on their internet browsers (weather it be at home or at school) they can clip a article that they like or over a topic that you choose for them. Here’s an example of article I clipped and also added a short response, the article is over the events in Libya. What’s good about this is that students can email you the article they clipped or share in on Facebook, Twitter, or copy the note URL and put it in their Livebinder.
How does this help the teacher?
When I was student teaching, I had students who lost their notes, forgot to bring them to class, and everything in between. As we discussed in the first post of this series, students can access their notes from their computer, tablet, or mobile device. When a student scans their notes into their Evernote account, they won’t be able to say “I lost them” or “I forgot them”. Of course, as the teacher, you might consider typing or scanning your notes into your Evernote yourself. This way, if you do want to share your notes with your students, you can share them the same way your students can. Here’s how to share notes and notebooks.
Conclusion:
Hopefully this gave you some ideas on how you might use Evernote in your History class. As with any technology tool that is used in the classroom, the main goal of it is to use it to engage the students and nurture them to become life-long learners. Once I showed Evernote to my former student, she automatically started to see things that she could do with it.
Next week, we’ll look at how Evernote can help in the Geography class. Looking forward to sharing more ideas for using Evernote the Social Studies classroom!
