Advice for Using Evernote for High School Science Notebooks

[JLund 0]

There is a lot of great information in this Forum.  I apologize if this is a little redundant, but I'm starting a new topic to seek some advice.  I am looking to use Evernote in my High School Biology class.  I teach in a 1:1 iPad district - every student has one.  I have done this in the past - with great success, but tried something different this year with shared Google Folders (because my team used Google).  But...  I want to go back to using Evernote...  

 

We use another platform in our district (called Schoology) to push out documents, assessments, etc., so I'm not looking for those capabilities.  I simply want to have access to my students' digital science notebooks.  I originally tried having students share their notebooks with me (before I knew about the limit of 100 shared NBs).  Here is what I did last year, with students and myself using the Free version of Evernote:

• students created account and notebook
• rather than sharing it with me directly, they shared it using the "Public Sharing Link"
• they copied and pasted that link into a Google Form that organized the entire class into a spreadsheet for me

Pros of Evernote:

• constant, 24/7 access to their notebook (as long as the live link stays open)
• students can easily insert pictures, tables, graphs, pdf's, etc, all of which can be edited with Skitch - this is perfect for a digital Lab notebook

Limitations:

• the obvious limitation with the Free Version is that it is not collaborative with me or other students (Like a Google Doc would be)
• I've also had a couple of students that would somehow delete content that we could NOT figure out how to recover

 

So... after all that...  any suggestions?

One big question I have:  If I upgrade to a premium account, can I have collaborative access to 100+ notebooks?  It's not an option to think students can or would upgrade.

[JLund 0]

So...  I just read in another post about whether or not Evernote will still use public notebooks.   

 

That's ok...  I can make do with Google.

 

?

[Greta Caruso 0]

Hi JLund,

I am at a secondary school in Melbourne Australia, we have dealt with the same issues. We also used your solution.

A few other suggestions are

1. Get the students to set up a shared notebook that contains just the notes that are current. Once the teacher has checked and responded the student moves it to a non-share notebook. so the effect is that the shared notebook is the active on and the others are files for reference.
2. Check out Evernote very generous 75% education Evernote offer schools
3. you can also convert notebook links to a QR code than share the code.

Good luck

Greta Caruso