Warning: Professional Development Overload

The past six weeks have been a whirlwind of learning! I have attended my first EdCamp, first iPad Institute, first Literacy Institute and first ISTE...interspersed with on campus and online classes...and capped it off yesterday by presenting my first two sessions ever!

I have also been busy networking with fellow Graphite Educators, fellow PBS Media Digital Innovators as well as my invaluable PLN Tweeps (@megcurlteach).

As a learner, I have been challenged by the daunting task of archiving all the great resources I want to use as well as deciding which resources to bring to my classroom (lab) this year. I have been taking digital notes, photographs and videos as a way to remember great ideas shared by other educators.

Now comes the real fun, planning my beginning of the year learning activities along with the rituals and routines necessary to make the whole set function!

I plan to discard last year's lesson plans in Evernote, read through the hundreds of resources I have saved to Pocket, scan my Google Drive for examples of student work to retool, and reuse.

I hope my enthusiasm spreads to my students and colleagues as we launch another brave new beginning!

I will be posting specific activities from my work with students. I would love to know about some of your successes!

Archiving Resources

I enjoy finding digital resources for my students and myself. One issue that quickly becomes apparent is how to store and find them when needed. I used to simply bookmark sites. Occasionally, I would manage them, but my collection grew too large for that system. I now use three tools to stay organized: Pocket, Evernote and Pinterest.

Pocket, formerly Read It Later, is very similar to bookmarking on your browser. As I read a tweeted link or an article on a website, I often want to save it. Once I manage the applications to grant access to my Pocket account, I have the option to "Read Later" when I select the share icon on my mobile device.

At a later time, I go to either the webpage or to the app to read my articles. At that point, I make another decision: keep it in Pocket, delete it, or add it to my Evernote notebooks or Pinterest boards.

I have written about Evernote previously. I use it to write my lesson plans and to archive many digital resources. Evernote allows me to tag anything so I can easily find what I look for. Notes within Notebooks make it easy to file items in an organizational scheme.

View options allow me to see my notes as a list, or, as shown here, as snippets. Evernote also makes it easy to share Notebooks with others making it a great tool to keep track of resources for a group of teachers.

Pinterest is a social networking service that allows users to "pin" websites onto "boards." Users get information and share by following others. Some websites do not allow pinning and since Pinterest's focus is on images, webpages without images cannot be used. Pinterest has broad categories of items, such as education, gardening and travel. It is also searchable. While I tend to use Evernote and Pocket only for work, my boards are a combination of professional and personal items. You can find me at Meg King-Abraham.

I have installed bookmarklets for these three services on my computer to make it really easy to archive all my resources. Do you have other suggestions for great archiving tools? Feel free to share them in a comment!

Planning with Evernote

Evernote is a free web-based tool that allows users to save, organize and then find almost anything. I am using it in these weeks before school starts to write and organize my lesson plans. I am able to create notebooks which store all my notes. I can tag my notes to help me find specific subjects later.

Some features that really impress me are the abilities to tag my notes and perform text searches of them.  This will enable me to find a resource even when I have forgotten which folder or note it is in.

Evernote syncs my notes to all my devices.  I used to think it was great to only have to carry my laptop home.  Now, I wouldn't even have to do that in many cases, as I can access Evernote anywhere.

Another great feature is the ability to clip websites, photographs, audio files, etc. The Evernote Web Clipper is installed on my computer and iPad.  When I come across a resource I want to keep, I click on the icon in my toolbar. A box appears which lets me choose which folder I want to put it in, along with tags and notes. The image and url are saved as a note.

There are ways to configure notes as you prefer to see them. I love the fact that I can put everything in one place.

I know I have a lot more to learn about this tool, but it was easy to begin using its awesome functions.