My Digital Portfolio

Evernote:  My Digital Portfolio    

Platform:

For my digital portfolio, I used the program Evernote to help me organize my school and home life. It’s a program that allows me to keep all my digital resources in one place where I can access them from my pc at school, my mac at home as well as my iPhone or iPad. The primary reason I began using Evernote was to insure that I was always working on the latest version of one of my files. I no longer have to guess which version of a file or activity is the latest because I always make sure I’ve saved it to Evernote. The tagging feature makes it easy to search for files. I have created Notebooks for each subject that I teach and have Notes for each topic that has many different kinds of resources.

Evernote supports me as a student (learner status) by allowing me to keep my projects- whether they are finished or still in draft form- where I always have access to them.  

Content:

As I find myself trying to develop activities and projects that create deeper learning in students, I need to organize my resources to better serve my students and myself.  Evernote has allowed me to maintain my own library of digital resources and blogs that are organized by the topic they support. Today’s students are very comfortable with an on-line environment and I find that Evernote puts this information at my fingertips to share with them and my colleagues. I can share with everyone because I can locate the resources I need. It has increased my ability to customize work for specific students because I can store different versions of an assignment with resources of all kinds. 

Professionally, I have begun to save my links to other teachers’ blogs, as well as all my reflections and posts to Notes to make them more accessible in the future.

Currently I have several notes on Digital Citizenship – which I will need to create a notebook for, since I now have just too many graphics, links and files to keep even on several notes.

Reflection:

 I now use Evernote to access, store and share information many times per day.  It’s always running in the background and I frequently project a screen of my Evernote for my students to see some of the work that I am doing. I think this modeling is important to show students. As the saying goes, ”We should eat our own dog food”. In other words, if we teach (or preach) using technology in a responsible way, we should be able to demonstrate that to students.  The work for me has just begun. As I have expressed in many posts, I often feel frustrated that change doesn’t always go as smoothly as I would like. The students also feel some of the discomfort that comes with a major shift. I hope to start next year using the flipped classroom model so that students will get used to it right from the beginning. I need to rethink my lessons, gather more activities and create more project-based learning to make my classroom more student-centered. I will continue to add to my Evernote notebooks and look forward to learning some of its other features. Much work needs to be done to adapt activities to align to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and include elements of digital citizenship in a natural way.