iRead Using Evernote

In the past I've blogged about Evernote and it's great ability to collate notes and make them available to you online and on your mobile device. Today I had a great experience using Evernote in a different way - to collate and hold iRead recordings.

iRead is a simple but very effective reading tool that I use as part of the Reading timetable. The students use a voice tool e.g. Garageband on laptops, voice recording on a tape etc to record themselves reading. Simple rules - once they start reading they don't stop the recording until they have completed reading the text. Once they complete reading they then go back and listen to the text and they follow the text with their finger. It allows students to listen to their own reading and set personal goals based on what they hear and observe about their reading and the kind of reader they want to be. I've found it's a powerful tool for kids to set goals about their reading. You can tell kids - but they also need to see/hear them for themselves to fully understand their next learning steps.

Today with one of my students we logged into Evernote and set up a new note. We labelled the note with the students name and the book that he read. Each new note automatically timestamps itself so there is no need for dates. When the student was ready to record all they needed to do was click the 'microphone' then the 'stop' button when he was completed. Once he had gone back and listened to his story he was able to record his goal down within the note to be saved. Once Evernote was synced it meant that I could access his recording and goal quite easily from my iPad or laptop. The great thing with this is that we can also easily tag the note as the students name which will create a mini portfolio of his reading throughout the year. Much quicker than getting students to save it to the server and it also meant that it was easily found by me, the teacher, to listen to. Evernote also includes the voice recording as a sound file that can easily be downloaded from the note.

This is the 'note' as you would see it online:


It's a very clear layout which makes it easy for students to create and navigate notes and within the app. I'm looking forward to seeing how this supports some of my lower readers with their reading fluency.