Advice on scanner for secondary English classroom UK

[Toby Ray 1]

Hello everyone,

 

I am hoping to trial Evernote for student portfolios in my English classroom, but am not sure which scanner would be best for the job.

 

I will teach aprox. 150 11-16 year olds and want their best work, and reflection to be on Evernote for school and home use.

So that I can comment on their notes, I will create a notebook for each student in my premium account (that will be a late night!), and then share the notebook with each student.

 

I envisage having mobile devices like iPad minis or ipod touches that can photograph paper work, but from reading Rob Van Nood's Ebook on this topic, feel that a dedicated scanner is a good idea too. Perhaps the ipads will be in use by another class one day?

 

My main question is then, what scanner do you recommend? Rob used a Lexmark Pinnacle Pro, which I believe is an all-in-one printer/scanner- but looking online, I don't think this is a current model, nor do I envisage I will need a printer.

 

My wish list is as follows:

 

1/ Can scan pages from notebooks (does this rule out Doxie?)

2/ Can be fed single sheets too (flatbed with ADF?)

3/ Is fast

4/ Can send to Evernote quickly and easily

5/ Can store Evernote notebook names, so that students can easily send their work to the right notebook, and not need me to move scores of notes, probably without names on, to the right notebook.

6/ Is affordable!

 

Does anyone have a view? Thanks for any help!

 

Toby Ray

London

[pjcollier 4]

Toby,

Great question! I currently use the Fujitsu ScanSnap for my class portfolios, but it isn't able to scan from notebooks. Depending on how often you'd need to scan from notebooks, using a scanner app for those specific assignments may work. For everything else, I don't know if there's a better scanner (at least for me). I'd love to hear what direction you end up going. Have fun!

This link may help you out http://jcollierblog.com/evernote/creating-student-portfolios

Jordan

jcollierblog.com

[jbenson2 2,147]

I will teach aprox. 150 11-16 year olds <snip>

I will create a notebook for each student in my premium account (that will be a late night!),

 

You might want to reconsider, especially if you expect to be teaching more kids next year.

The maximum number of notebooks in Evernote is 250.

 

A more efficient method would be to use unique tags to identify each student. example: Smith-John or Smith-J-2014

Or include the student's unique ID number in each note and let Evernote search find the relevant notes.

[Toby Ray 1]

Jbenson, that's a good point, after one year I would exceed the total notebooks allowed.

Perhaps I could hand the notebooks over to another teacher after a year as they usually change each year(ie. share with next teacher, they copy, I delete)?

Or as you say, students could tag their name and keep notes within one class notebook.

But can you set edit permissions per note? I wouldn't want all students in a class to edit any note.

[jbenson2 2,147]

Personally, I have a bad feeling about trying to run a classroom with Evernote.

It just is not very good with heavy collaboration involving lots of people.

 

You could have students send their assignments to Evernote via email and add their own ID tag.

Use # for tags: Use a # symbol followed by the tag or tags you wish to assign. You can have multiple tags just make sure each one starts with an #

For example, the email subject could be:
Thesis on Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon #Benson-J-2013
 

But I think you are asking too much from Evernote if you want your 150 students to access their own submissions to review your comments. I'm not a teacher, perhaps there is a teacher on this forum that can offer a better suggestion.

 

Edit: Just saw this link. There might be some info there - or some contacts.

http://pinterest.com/meganaiemma/evernote-for-business-and-education/

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Speaking for myself, I think the submission of assignments can become quite tricky with dozens of students, and that is why (at the university level, at least) specialized software like Blackboard (by PeopleSoft?) was developed.

That's not to say that Evernote can't play a role, though. If you were to create a shared notebook for all of the students and posted assignments in it, made materials available (video clips, links, images, etc.), and provided general feedback for assignments ("Here are some especially well-written passages from the homework assignments. Notice how all of them use a variety of verbs from the vocabulary we have been learning."), then I think it could be a powerful tool for them. You could also ask the students to create a notebook called "teacher" in their accounts, you could scan the assignments with your comments, and mail them into the students' accounts. This would help you go paperless (you'd have a record of every assignment ever done) and help the students to build a library of their work.

In the end, managing 150 shared notebooks is going to be tough. Naturally, there are a lot of teachers (see the forum for educators) who have opinions on this, and there is no right answer, except that the most successful use cases probably involve a clear sense of the learning outcomes they want to achieve.