Approaching the end of the year and thinking about the future, I am evaluating my technology yet again, and planning for the future. I've found that my iPad is absolutely my "go to" device, and I carry it around campus before school and during classroom walkthroughs. Although at first people were overly interested and/or intimidated by seeing me arrive with a tablet, I find that teachers (and students) no longer pay attention to it.
In Evernote, my current schema is to start a new note every day called Admin Log, which begins with a list of the things I need to do for the day. I usually start by copying the prior days' notes, so it's got all of the things I didn't get to previously. It includes both personal and professional items. I use tags for the school site I'm at, and for the grade level(s) I observe. It is very easy to sort by tags and see all of the 2nd grade notes, comments, and images. Some of my daily notes end up being quite long, particularly if I take several pictures, and I don't think the search feature in Evernote desktop works very well. Those factors make it difficult to find the right note or the right information within my notes.
For next year, I'm planning to organize my notes into more logical notebooks that are more easily searchable. After a conversation with D, I'm thinking about having separate notebooks for each teacher, so I can easily get back and see the observations I've done and photos I've taken. I can also attach PDFs and send emails to a notebook, so that makes it a one-stop shop for all of the data I'll need for evaluation and supervision. I'll have a different notebook for facilities, and others as I see the need. Parent contacts and discipline are a couple of things I'm still noodling about, as I'm not sure how useful it is to have that information solely within my account. Functionally, it's possible that the old fashioned binder is still the best way to deal with those items.
I'm still not sure how to deal with my to do list. Wunderlist just doesn't "speak" to me, and I find it quite cumbersome to use (Sorry Brian!). I'd kind of prefer to have everything together, but Evernote isn't really a very good tool for tracking longer projects. On this side, I'll have to just keep playing around with it to find a system that works.
Good thing that summer is coming up so I can get all this organized!
