A Little Vignette about Evernote

I want to share a little vignette from yesterday about Evernote. Yesterday was our last day of school before winter break and all the 9th graders had been told to hand in their iPads so we could do maintenance on them over the break. We have just finished our first month of a one-to-one iPad pilot with our 9th graders. When they received their iPads, they were locked down with no App Store just to get them used to the device and the various apps that we placed on them. Since then we have installed a mobile device management solution, Airwatch, which will be installed on all of the student iPads over the break. So we would now be able to give them an App Store while managing what apps they can and cannot install on their iPads.

So we collected all the iPads by 3:30PM. I was feeling pretty good about this when suddenly I got a desperate call from one of my science teachers. She tells me that she had assigned work over winter break and all of her students had told her that they cannot do the assignment since their notes from the past month are on their iPads which was now handed into the main office. This is a 21st century version of the old "I left my textbook in school" excuse. I cannot do my homework because I left my iPad in school over the break.

Evernote to the rescue! I quickly ran over to the science lab and asked the students, "How many of you took your notes on your iPad using Evernote?" Every student but one raised their hands. You see, Evernote was the only note-taking app that we had given the students so far. This is for many reasons. It is free. It allows one to easily insert pictures and sound, and most importantly. It is a cloud based solution, meaning every student has every note taken on the device backed up on Evernote.com automatically. So I told the students, "You are in luck! All you need to do to access your notes without your iPad is log into Evernote.com and all of your notes will be there!" I am not sure if the students were happy that I found them a solution or mad that they no longer had an excuse why they could not do their homework. I can tell you that the teacher was very happy.

Then one student raised his hand and said, "I don't use Evernote to take my notes!" Now I am thinking, "Oy, this kid is going to lose his notes!" So I asked him which app he uses to take notes. His response? "Google Drive." Another cloud based solution. And then the two of us shared a knowing smile.