Using Evernote: Additional Info from Tracy Green

I was surprised by how few people in my Fall Conference sessions were familiar with Evernote, and many seemed curious, so I wanted to share more info. Evernote is a cross-platform notation tool … but that’s selling it really short.

Our district administrators use Evernote extensively, largely because of its portability, cross-referencing abilities and sharing capabilities. There are two primary ways to organize in Evernote: notebooks and tags.

Notebooks are great because they can be nested and they can be shared. For instance, each month our principals are provided a monthly checklist with due dates and other tasks we don’t want them to forget. We draft and archive these in an Evernote shared notebook, which our administrative team can annotate as we build the final version. We also share a notebook for our media relations, including our weekly tip sheet. Communications Assistant Lori McDowell and I can both add to the note as the week goes on, then when Friday rolls around, we clean it up and send it out.

You can also add tags to entires, which gives you a quick way to search for notes. I have notes tagged “transportation” that might be saved in a number of notebooks, but I can recall them all quickly.

Evernote also allows you to save documents, images, etc. within a note. If you have an Excel spreadsheet saved in a note, for example, you can open the spreadsheet and update it, and it’ll update within Evernote. If you subscribe to the premium version, it will make all your images and PDFs searchable, too. We archive all our media clippings within Evernote — another time that the tagging feature comes in handy, because I can pull up the “food services” tag and see not just my own notes but also any related media coverage.

Evernote is free and it is cross-platform. Mac or PC, Android or iPhone. You can take a quick note in the car and it’ll be waiting for you in the desktop version by the time you make it inside.

Oh! And reminders and list items! You can add reminders to notes, including with a time/date deadline. And, you can make lists with checkboxes — then search for notes with unchecked boxes!

It also comes with built-in PDF annotating, a chat feature (new, I haven’t tried it yet) and a presentation mode. And a web clipper. And wait, there’s more! Really, these guys should give me a job.

Click here to learn more and to download: https://evernote.com/evernote/guide/mac/

Tracy Harris Green
Director of Communications and Development
Oldham County Schools