Evernote – Sorting Through Notes Made Simple
Do you ever look at your students’ notebooks and wonder how they ever find anything? Do you find yourself bookmarking websites for just one piece of information? Do you write notes on your computer or on paper that you end up trashing or tediously sorting through? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a program that would do the searching and sorting for you? Well, there is and it’s called Evernote!

Evernote comes in two forms for PC and Mac and both perform the same great function, sorting and searching through your notes for you. Evernote can be downloaded and installed on your computer or you can use the web-based version, both are free. Evernote can be used to copy parts of websites and put into a notebook for later use. Evernote can also be used to write notes on your computer, on a mobile device, or on paper to be put into a notebook for later use. Your notebook uses tags to find your notes for you when you need them later.

Here is a short introduction to Evernote.

Here is a short demonstration of using Evernote on a Mac.


Applications for Educators
Evernote is a good utility for students using the Internet for research. Rather than copying and pasting to a word document or bookmarking websites to then later search through students can save to Evernote and quickly revisit the information they need. I think of this as the 21st century version of making research cards and writing down the “slugs” as many of us did in high school and college.
Evernote is very useful for the student who struggles to organize a notebook (either online or paper version). The searching and sorting features of Evernote will help students find the information they need from their notes to prepare for an exam.