Is it better to share one big notebook or many smaller ones?

[twatters 2]

In terms of user experience (speed, ease of use, and EN's limits) is it better to share one notebook with many units of instruction perhaps tagged or organized in a table of contents note with links OR a separate shared notebook for each unit of instruction?

One of the reasons I ask is because we'll be using CK12.org's Flexbooks to supplement our text. The pdf for the whole book is huge so I split it into quarters but each still comes in around 25MB. I can further split it into chapters to bring the size down even more. I would like to make the pdf available on the shared notebook along with other resources.

So, would it be better to have one big shared notebook with all these pdf chapters as individual notes or separate shared notebooks for each chapter?

I guess my questions relates to how Evernote presents shared notebooks to viewers. When a viewer receives an invitation to "View this notebook" and clicks through to view it are all the notes embedded in the file or just the headers to each note with links to them? Does the size of a notebook drastically affect the speed and ease of viewing?

Thanks.

Tim Watters

High School Science Teacher

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi Tim. I prefer to keep things simple, and I try to share everything in one notebook. I would definitely split up the PDFs into chapter-sized bites, if possible, in order to make it easier for students to use.

Let's say you have a note for every chapter, and each note contains a PDF attachment of the chapter, with the titles of the notes something like "Chapter 01 The Founding of the Republic" and "Chapter 02 Sugar, Salt, Tea, and Democracy." Then, you make a note called "!Index", select all of your notes, and drag them into !Index. Now, when you sort the notes by title, you will see everything line up nice and pretty, with an index/table of contents at the top. When you share the notebook, you can specify the sort type, so when students visit the page for the first time, it will all be in order.

[twatters 2]

Thanks GrumpyMonkey.

My plan was similar to yours... one notebook with a table of contents pinned to the top.

I wonder what happens, however, if I share the notebook to "anyone with the link" and a non EN account holder tries to view it. Is the notebook rendered as one big honkin html file with every note or is one small web page shown with links to individual notes?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Give it a try by private / incognito browsing. It's always good to test these things out that way. It looks pretty much like it would in your Evernote account using the Web client, even if they don't join. I have links to a bunch of shared notebooks here that might give you some ideas, including ones by students http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/sharednotebooks.html

Two words of warning: the Evernote web client does not work properly with any browser on the iPad (as far as I know), so if someone plans to view your shared notebook on the iPad, but does not plan to join it in their Evernote account, it will not go well. Presumably, all of your viewers will be Evernote account holders.

Second, note links in notebooks that are shared with you will not work properly on the iPad. So, if someone wants to use your index note while viewing the notebook on their iPad, it will not go well. Everything will still line up in order, though, so maybe in this case it is not a big deal.