Evernote recently release a substantial update with 5.0. There are some really cool new features, some amazing navigational changes and a much cleaner and appealing user experience.
After watching the video you get a quick glimpse into some of what they’ve done, but one of the things missing from the video which was something our teachers was the ability to stack shared notebooks.
Previously you would toggle to the shared notebook view and see all of the notebooks shared with you. You could sort these notebooks by name or by the user who has shared them with you, but for teachers this does little good when you really want to organize you notes by class.
We worked with faculty to help them come up with shortname naming conventions that they would have their student use to name their notebooks so that they would be sorted by class when shared. A teacher might tell a student to create a notebook named “8Hist01_Stites” to indicate that it was for 8th grade history, section 1 for student Stites.
Now with Evernote 5.0 you not only see all of your shared notebooks with you personal notebooks you can create stacks of these notebooks by class. You have the ability to search across these notebooks as well along with you local notebooks. This includes the searching of tags, which is another HUGE piece for classroom organization.
An important note on sharing and tagging… you can only add a tag to a shared notebook if the owner of that notebook has already created that tag. Not sure why, but will be something to consider in you planning and organization. As a class you can establish class/course specific tags that you will all use. This could prove to be a very useful lesson if you begin to incorporate other types of learning into you instruction that leverage tags like blogging and Twitter.
These simple, yet powerful organizational changes will make organization for teachers much easier and avoid the confusion created by naming conventions that no one understood.
If you haven’t updated to Evernote 5 yet I highly recommend it!
