Take Notes: Evernote

Evernote is a free online tool students can use to take notes. Your notes save onto the Evernote cloud so that you can access them at school, home, or anywhere else you may go to study! Evernote allows you to keep everything organized, and even include hyperlinks and graphics. Students can also build check lists that could help them stay organized! With more and more schools investing in personal devices for their students, using Evernote for class notes seems easy. Unfortunately, not all schools are fortunate enough to give each student a device. In addition, having any type of device in a classroom setting could easily become a distraction.



Evernote does have paid services with additional features such as offline access, and password protections across multiple devices.

As a prospective English teacher, Evernote could be a great note-taking tool for my students. I could require them to share their notes with me, so that I can check to make sure they're understanding the major themes and concepts from lessons. In addition, they could share their notes with the peers, like if a student were absent for class one day. They would easily be able to share class notes via email.

History of Technology in English

Mass-production of the pencil in the late 19th century has made a drastic impact on English classrooms everywhere. The pencil allowed all students more portability to write anywhere!

Share Ideas & Opinions: Kidblog

Link: http://kidblog.org/home/

Kidblog is a publishing tool that gives teachers the ability to provide a safe, kid friendly environment for their students to publish online. Teachers can monitor all of their students activity, even comments, and have control over what material goes live and to how wide a range of audience. Students can even send codes to their parents to give them access too! The site even allows other classes to connect with one another! With Google integration, students can also embed Google Docs, Presentations or Drawings to enhance their publishing.

Teachers can start with a free account which gives them basic access to all of the sites features, and allows them to invite or send special "join codes" to up to 40 students per "class". There are two tiers of paid accounts, the "Teacher Premium" and "Admin Pro", which start at $29/year per teacher.

As a prospective English teacher, I can imagine using Kidblog as a great tool for my students to write their impressions and opinions of the books we read in class, and talk to one another about them. One feature of this site that I find most appealing for my future classes is the class connect feature. As a secondary teacher, this would be a great way for me to get all of my students to talk to one another on the same material.

I feel that this site really aims at relieving any technological limitations by creating a very basic, straight-forward interface, allowing all users to navigate the site easily. Since teachers are in the middle of everything that goes on within the class, and there are no ads within the site, I think it makes for a very safe environment as well for students. The only limitations that I see are for other content areas, as in I'm not sure how a math or science class could benefit from a class blog.