Lesson plans

[jrivers 1]

My school principal would like to use EN for all teachers in his school.  I created the general form the administration wants used each week.  At this point we have the free account.  Is it possible for him to set up notebooks for each teacher? Also, how will the teachers save their weekly lesson plans and keep the original form blank so they can use it again the following week without having to delete what they typed the previous week?  We are trying to go paperless with lesson plans and this seems to be a really great program to use.  Will we need a school account?

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

I think in this case you'd be best to consider Premium, but more likely a Business account (I believe there are education/non-profit prices available). 

All accounts have limits on how many notebooks you can have and share, and how much you can upload each month. Free and Premium's limits may be too low depending on the size of your institution. 

More details on the limits of various levels of service:

https://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#!/article/23283158

 

However, putting that aside, lets consider the questions you pose. 

 

 

 

Is it possible for him to set up notebooks for each teacher?

In theory, yes, though this depends on the number of teachers. View the limits for each level of service. At a minimum, the principle would need a premium account to share more than one notebook with edit privileges (meaning, invitees can modify the notebooks contents).

There may be more efficient ways of doing this. You might create notebooks for each subject or for each course, rather than a notebook per teacher. You could then invite teachers to notebooks relevant to their area. So, lets say you have a gr 11 physics class "Physics 11". You can create a notebook called "physics 11" and invite all the physics 11 teachers to that notebook. Likewise, you might have English 12, to which you'd invite all of your english 12 teachers. This way, if teaching staff shuffle each year, you can simply revoke access to notebooks they no longer teach, and invite them to notebooks they are now teaching. The major benefit of this is that you avoid frequently moving a large number of notes around, which if not done carefully could result in misplaced or lost data. Shuffling users in and out of notebooks that remain essentially static in their contents is going to drastically reduce the chances of an error. 

 

 

Depending on the number of teachers you have, though, I would highly recommend avoiding having one notebook per teacher, at least to avoid hitting account limitations, but also to prevent an organizational nightmare. 

 

 

 

 

how will the teachers save their weekly lesson plans and keep the original form blank so they can use it again the following week without having to delete what they typed the previous week? 

 

Following the above scheme, the principal could make the course notebooks "read only", so that teachers cannot modify the contents. Instead, they would copy any forms or plans they need to one of their own, personal notebooks. This means there would always be a blank form in the course notebook to be re-used over and over by copying it to the teacher's own notebook(s).

 

 

 

I could see something like the following:

Notebooks shared by principal as read-only:

Course A

Course B

Course ......

Course N

General Administration/Resources

 

Each "Course" notebook would contain all relevant course material, including lesson plans and forms, etc. that the principal wants to provide the teachers of that course. These notebooks would be updated and maintained by whichever administrator is responsible for this content (sounds like the principal?). You would have 1 or more notebooks for general school resources and administrative information, to which all teachers would be invited. 

 

The principal (or whomever the relevant administrator is) would invite teachers for each course to corresponding notebooks. When the teacher is no longer teaching that course, they can be removed. When a new teacher begins teaching a course, they can be added. 

 

Teachers will be invited to notebooks associated with the courses they are responsible for. They can view, but not modify the contents of these notebooks. Instead, they would copy a blank form or lesson plan from the "Course" to a notebook they create and maintain themselves, and which is not shared. This copy would be the one they can modify freely, and each week or as needed they can copy the form/lesson plan from the shared notebook to their own notebook (or notebooks, depending on how they like to keep themselves organized). 

 

As you can see, this is fairly one-way. The principal (or relevant administrator) sets up and maintains the "Course" notebooks, and shares them to appropriate teachers. This would ensure that the integrity of the "Course" notebooks is maintained, and reduces the chances of a teacher inadvertently modifying their contents.

 

You could, of course, set of one or more notebooks that are shared such that both principal and teachers can modify contents. 

 

At the very least, the principal would need a premium account. Teachers may be able to get away with free accounts, depending on exactly the nature of the contents being stored. Much of this, however, would be facilitated by some Evernote Business features, which offers a bit more robust administration. 

 

 

Again, just brainstorming here, not knowing the details of how your institution is organized. Perhaps at the very least this gives you some sense of what level of Evernote service would work best, and a starting point for organization. 

[Applechalk 3]

I would suggest allowing teachers to have their own Evernote account, like mentioned above and encourage them to tag according to topic, technology used, year, anything else useful and then have them share the notes link with their principal. Have teachers think of the notebooks as file cabinets, notes as files.

Then have their principal have a folder in their email with the teacher's name and have them save email with the lessons Evernote link.

 

Keep it simple.

[JayF 30]

I am a teacher educator, and require my student teachers to share some of their work with me (and each other) via Evernote.  I have shared a notebook for the class that they can add to or copy from.  They do their individual work in their own notebooks and just copy over notes such as lesson plans that they are supposed to share.  

 

One nuance of shared notebooks is that the notebook's owner is the only one who can tag the notes in the shared notebook. For that reason, teachers should have their own notebooks (and tags) and just copy over notes they want to share into the 'central notebook.'

 

I would start with free accounts to gauge actual need.  If most of what you store is text, the free account will go surprisingly far.  

 

Jay