Learn To Organize Your Homeschool for Free With Evernote

Learn To Organize Your Homeschool for Free With Evernote
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jenny_McDaniel]Jenny McDaniel

The thought of homeschooling conjures many fears for new homeschooling parents. One of those fears is record keeping both for the state as well as recording educational growth of your child. You have the option of saving every paper and filing away in a cabinet or be savvy and use a paperless trail. I personally love the ease and convenience of Evernote. The program allows me to use my desktop or an app on my phone to record numerous milestones and allows me to seamlessly transition between my phone or computer by automatically syncing the data. Evernote allows for personalizing data to your lifestyle so the ways to use this program seems limitless! That prospect will either excite you or scare you depending on your personality. Here I would like to share how I have been using Evernote for over a year for our homeschoolers and give you a starting point for optimizing your own organizational system with Evernote.

Notebooks

Picture having several notebooks laying on your desk. Perhaps there is one for math, another for science and several more for unit studies and handwriting. Now instead of those books taking up space they are in one place, never to be lost and can be accessed through a cell phone, tablet or computer! Notebooks can be labeled anyway you want and in a system that works for your family.

Sub notebooks

After you have decided to go by name or subject you can then click on that notebook and create sub notebooks or "stack" as phrased on the Evernote blog. For my middle child I have a notebook with his name and after clicking on it I have his birth certificate, receipts for baseball (which was added by taking a photo with my cell) and numerous other important info that pertains to him.

Planner

With so many different things I want to teach my children I use to get lost not knowing what to do next. Having a notebook gives me a way of planning and editing in a simplified manner. After clicking on my Planner notebook I can then go to a sub notebook with the day of the week. Monday is typically a math day, Tuesday would be spelling and writing material, Wednesday reading and Thursday unit study. Breaking it down in this way keeps us from feeling overloaded. My child can click on the appropriate day and use the check box feature to check off lessons that have been completed for that day.

Archive

This is one of my favorite notebooks in Evernote! I list the day we are on (day 48 of 180 for example) and I post pictures of the completed work as well as snap shots of our day. I would like to add that the archive folder may come in handy if someone chooses to dispute that I do school work with my children.

Journal

Sometimes you have those funny little moments that you don't want to forget. For those times I use an app called VJournal that I can quickly open up, tap out a few lines and it instantly syncs to my Evernote account. I doubt I have even scraped the surface of all the extra apps and plug ins offered by Evernote.

Free or pay

I stated that Evernote is a free organizational tool that I use for homeschool. For my needs the free program is enough. If you find yourself posting and storing a lot then you may need to upgrade to a premium account for a small fee. Honestly, if you are storing that much data then you will have no problem paying for convenience.

Nothing to lose to test drive the program. I would suggest watching a tutorial on YouTube or visiting Evernotes blog to get a sense of how you want to set it up. I think you will be glad you did. Teaching your child how to store documents online and navigate Evernote is a nice little lesson in itself.

  https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/05/24/quick-tip-friday-how-to-organize-your-notebooks-in-evernote/

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Learn-To-Organize-Your-Homeschool-for-Free-With-Evernote&id=8867006] Learn To Organize Your Homeschool for Free With Evernote