28 April 2014

A Look Inside Our Evernote Unschooling Records Notebooks


I made this video in the spirit of sharing ideas, and not to show off our unschooling life. There are many ways of doing things. This is just one of them…

I just learnt how to make a screencast video! 
After I wrote
the post A Perfect Method for Keeping Unschooling Records, I wondered if I
could work out how to make a guided tour video of my Evernote unschooling
notebooks. I did work it out! Would you like to have a look?
This is not a professional quality video. Far from it! It’s unscripted and I have a rather croaky voice at the moment. (My throat is a
bit sore today.) I just pressed the ‘record’ button, and then chatted about my
notebooks, while clicking onto the various notes. If you came to my home to visit me and
said, “Sue, could you show me how you use Evernote?”  we’d sit down in front of my computer and I’d
chat. What I’d say would probably be very much like what ended up in this video.
What did I chat about? I talked about notebooks, labels and
tags. I showed notes containing photos, images, icons, screenshots, descriptions,
video links, article and blog posts, book and DVD covers…
I set out to make a short video but I talked too much, like
usual. (I think if I’m ever going to become a proper vlogger, I shall have to become more organised and disciplined.) However if you have time to watch the video to the end, you might get a
feel for how unschooling works in our family (if you’re interested of course!) You can always stop the video after the first few minutes!

READ  My New Book: The Unschool Challenge

If you watch my video… thank you!

PS: I have a second Evernote video I will post soon. It’s about creating notebooks, stacking them, and moving notes from one notebook to another. 

Update: I’ve posted the second Evernote video. It’s called Creating Evernote Unschooling Notebooks

You can also find me on my Sue Elvis Writes Facebook page. It’s a public page so even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you can still read the posts and comments. I often post links to resources and other interesting stuff. I’d love to see you there!


Sue Elvis

I'm an Australian blogger, podcaster, and Youtuber. I write and speak about unschooling, parenting and family life. I'm also the author of the unschooling books 'Curious Unschoolers', 'Radical Unschool Love' and ‘The Unschool Challenge’. You'll find them on Amazon!

8 Comments

  1. Amber,

    I'm so glad you found this useful. It's good to share ideas. isn't it? I hadn't thought about how our Evernote records can help others 'see' our children are learning. That is such a good point! I was just thinking in terms of the registration requirements but you are so right. There are times when we want to convince other people our kids are actually DOING something! Thank you so much for stopping by. I appreciate your comment!

  2. Yes! Thank you! Being a visual learner myself this has helped me to organize our homeschooling journey so that others can "see" we are learning!

  3. This is so helpful! I have Evernote and am always curious about ways to use it more effectively. The idea of using it for unschooling recordkeeping is brilliant, and I appreciate your going through the way you've organized yours. Where I live, my oldest son is just approaching the age where we have to keep homeschooling records, so I'm researching what makes sense for us. I've watched your videos & pinned your post. Thanks for sharing!

    • Lauren,

      Your comment has made my day. Thank you! I am so glad my Evernote posts and videos have been helpful for you. I used to resent having to keep homeschool records. I don't really mind now that I'm using Evernote. I feel like I'm putting together a journal of my children's lives for our benefit, as well as for fulfilling our registration requirement. I love adding photos and other images, and links of movies we have enjoyed together, Youtube videos, blog posts etc: a collection of memories!

      Thank you so much for pinning my post, and for stopping by to say hello!

  4. What are you going to do with last year notebooks? I thought I could just archive them all under Homeschool, but I can't figure out an easy way to do that. I have been using Evernote for more than homeschool and it is going to get messy if I start adding notebooks for this year.

    • HeatherLee,

      I've also been wondering about archived notebooks! So far, they are still in my side-bar. I've just collapsed them. They don't take up much space, but maybe one day I will have too many notebooks and want to remove them.

      We could start with fewer notebooks and use more tags. If we had one notebook per term rather than one per week, we could tag the notes with the appropriate week. Using these tags we could sort our notes into the various weeks when we want to look at them. I suppose with good tagging we could even have one notebook per year! I've read that Evernote is designed for multiple tags rather than multiple notebooks.

      If we want to remove the notebooks completely, but save them on our computers, we can export them to our hard drives. I found an article about doing this and tried it out. It works!

      http://www.ehow.com/how_8439605_archive-evernote-notebook.html

      We can always import the notebooks back into Evernote if we want to access them. Probably we could read them directly on our computers without importing them if we find the right file opener.

      My personal notebooks are getting into a mess so I might try reorganising them by having one notebook only and lots of tags such as 'writing ideas', 'recipes', 'diary'… I'll see if this helps!

      Thanks for stopping by!

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