Better Than Sticky Notes

Report card time is here!  My school uses standards based report cards, which means that my “grade book” is more than just a series of number grades.  More important than number grades for standards based report cards are anecdotal notes.  This year, a co-worker of mine has turned me on to a better way to write down those anecdotal notes than on the endless stream of sticky notes.  It’s a free iPad app/ website program called Evernote.

Inside this program, I have created a notebook for each of my students and then notes for each subject.  Every few days, I leave notes about each student.  When I use this as an app on my iPad, I can add pictures, pdfs or recordings to each note.  This has been a great way to do fluency checks and running records.  I can take a picture of the page or upload a screen shot, and then record my students reading the page. 

Since this program is also available on my computer and the notebooks automatically sync, I can also edit the notes on my computer.  This is great for me, because honestly as much as I love my iPad, I HATE typing on it, and I HATE trying to copy and paste even more.  So, if I have comments that require typing or copying and pasting, I can easily add them in on my computer and still have those notes on the iPad when I need them to conference with my students.

I am also planning on using these notes to help guide my conferences with parents.  Also, since my co-worker and I group our students for reading, we can also e-mail each other our notes on each others students, making report cards and conferences that much easier! 

Overall, this app has made my life so much easier and it’s way better than sticky notes!

For more ways to organize for report cards, check out this linky part at Teaching FSL.

Teaching Geology

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

For my current Earth Science Unit, we are using lots of different websites to research the materials of the earth.  This week’s website  - Kids Geo - is my students’ favorite research site so far.  They have all found some really good information on this site to help them with their Glog Project, and it’s sorted out with a kid-friendly index on the left hand side.  Best of all, the information is written in a way that even my English Language Learners can pick out the information they need.