I am barely a week out of school and I am already gearing up for next year. I thought I would share a successful use of the app Noteshelf (@noteshelf). Noteshelf has a lot of nice features. One of the neatest is the ability to create a page template based on a picture stored on the iPad. I took advantage of this feature by making a template for a weekly planbook. I made the template into a picture and put it in my dropbox. On my iPad I just moved a copy of the picture into my photo album and I was ready to import my new template into noteshelf app. Noteshelf has a smooth handwritting engine that makes it easy for me to write my lesson plans as if I was writing on paper. However, unlike paper I can easily erase, cut copy & past, add pictures, and type text. Noteshelf also let’s me organize notebooks into groups. It’s great in meetings because often I use the camera feature in my iPad to take a picture of the agenda. I used it the last inservice day to import pictures from a google doc slide show presentation which I took notes on during the presentation.
I made some fun worksheets during the school year that were easy to create with color and text. It is often very difficult to get equations, math symbols and graphs placed just right on a worksheet, but Noteshelf made that a lot easier. I also used the app to tutor with. I have a tendency to use a lot of paper when I tutor students. With Noteshelf this did not matter and I could send the whole thing as a pdf to the students email. I could also keep track of the notes from session to session.
I have tried a few other note taking apps but still keep coming back to Noteshelf. It is stable, has a lot of features and most importantly the script is smooth. The writing engines on some of the apps leaves the writing looking blocky. I have found the other apps that have smooth handwriting don’t have many features and organization is a problem. The apps that I have looked at are Notes Plus, Bamboo Paper, Note Taker HD, and Penultimate. I plan to make a new template in noteshelf to serve as my grade book. I keep a digital grade book in our school grading system, but that requires logging in using a computer.(not compatible with iPad) Sometimes for those little grades it makes more sence to have something in hand. I could also use the app to keep track of attendance but I have another neat app to do that for me. That one is called TeacherPal, but that is a review I will save for a different post.
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