I love when I can increase my productivity with only a little effort. Especially with two of my favorite tools, Schoology and Evernote.
A lot of a teacher’s time is spent on those activities outside of class in preparation for teaching. I often joke with my students that for every 1 hour of classroom teaching, another 1–2 hours were spent in preparation.
I whole heartedly believe that all teachers can save more time if they can more effectively leverage technology. This has been a professional goal of mine for a couple years. I have dramatically decreased my paper usage and have dramatically increased my productivity.
Combine Tools and Avoid Headaches
One of the biggest headaches was keeping track of all of my lesson plans. I wanted to remember each minute of my lessons along with all of the resources I had collected for a particular lesson. It was no surprise then that one of the first tools I adopted was Evernote to digitize my lesson plans.
When I first started teaching I used to keep all of my lesson plans in a binder. They were sorted by unit and stuffed into clear plastic sheets. I know this system works for many teachers but for me it was a nightmare. I spent way too much money on plastic sheets and I always forgot to put the lesson plans back into the sheets.
Then I used to keep my lesson plans on white and yellow 3×5 notecards. These were often stuffed in folders with other printed out resources I came across online. Needless to say that most of my lesson folders were bursting at the seams. In 2013 I began the ongoing process of digitizing all of my lesson plans using Evernote. The year before I started using Schoology to assign homework.
Want to know the real trick? Combining the two for ultimate productivity.
Productivity Recipe: Combine Schoology and Evernote
What is better than going paperless with lesson plans on Evernote? Going paperless in the classroom with Schoology! What is better than both of those? When they talk to one another so I don’t have to use two completely separate systems.
I have put together a screencast video for this week to show you how you too can combine Evernote and Schoology so you can be more productive, efficient, paperless, and happy.
Enjoy!
Question: What other ways do you combine tools to stay productive? Could be Schoology, Evernote, or another one.