In December I recorded a second grade student talking about how she uses
Evernote (see video below) to track and reflect on her fluency. Since then, a few more classes that I work with have started using Evernote for fluency. What I really like about using Evernote over apps like ShowMe, Educreations, or iTalk is that students have their work stored in a notebook for future reference. The student's work is not stuck on an iPad or in an account that needs to be sifted through to find recordings to compare for growth. Students can organize their notebooks to make it easy to find their fluency work, which is probably mixed in with other school work if students are taking full advantage of using Evernote and Skitch. Students can add tags to notes and/or organize their work by creating different notebooks. All notes can be sorted alphabetically or by date created. I have found it very easy to locate a note when I need to find a particular one.
What I have been demonstrating in classrooms that want to track fluency...
1. Title the note "Fluency" and the date recording.
2. Take a picture of a story to practice reading fluently. Some classrooms are using fluency probes.
3. Touch just after the photograph to get the bouncing cursor and click return twice to allow space between the photo and the recording.
4. Click on the microphone and record reading fluently.
5. Play the recording by touching it.
6. Return the cursor below the recording.
7. Reflect on the fluency. Ex: What did they do well? What do they need to work on?
8. Work on their goal and record again in a few days or within a weeks time. If going for speed, students can stop after a minute of recording, take a word count, and then set a goal for their next recording.
Using Evernote for Fluency from
Nicole Gleason on
Vimeo.
1) Do each of your students have their own Evernote account or is it a folder under the teacher's Evernote account?
ReplyDeleteA: Each student does have their own account.
2) If each student has his/her own account how do you control what goes on the account?
A: When students registered, I recorded their username and password. They used their own email address. Occasionally students did not spell correctly when registering. Then I had to do a password reset. Next year, I may take the time to register all of my incoming second graders myself. All other grades will continue with the account they created this year. Since there is a record of the account info, a teacher would be able to get into any account that may be suspected of misconduct. I have yet to have to do an investigation. Students have been pretty responsible so far.
3) When the student has written their reflection of the reading is it sent to the teacher or the parents?
Any note in Evernote has the ability to be sent by email. For the most part the classroom teacher and myself circulate and are giving feedback during class time. But if a student creates a note that a teacher wants to archive in his/her own digital records, then sending the note by email is a great option and of course sending any digital work to a parent is a wonderful idea. In my experience parents love, love, love, getting digital work from their children.
Thank you for the great questions Heather. I am going to copy and paste this in an email directly to you along with posting on my blog, "Let's Build a Frame".