The classroom that I will work with is a traditional Chinese classroom. The classroom problems include: students are bored by traditional way of learning; the learning was very passive, students lost interests and curiosity. Teacher was the centre of the classroom, instruction style is too stale, lack of creativity. Student are not good at expressing themselves, students can't think creatively and critically. Heavy workload for the teacher.
The first APP I will introduce to solve the teacher's problem is an organisational APP which helps the teacher to organise life and work to be more efficient, reduce waste of time, to be more inspirational, creative and productive.
This APP is called Evernote. Since the appearance of many social Apps, such as Facebook, twitter, people's life become more and more fragmentised. Many good ideas and thoughts come and go, many attractions get our attention in a short time, we get drifted away so easily. Evernote is a knowledge management tool that could make collecting, organising, thinking, practising, sharing become our habit. So we could seize any good ideas and thoughts immediately without losing it by other distractions.
First, it can collect our reading notes, articles, daily diaries, tasks, schedules, photos, class notes, and recordings. For example, I use Evernote to keep note for all my classes. The picture below is a few notes from my technology class.
If there are important text, I could click the "a" icon to highlight it in red. I could also change the font of the letters to make it look nice. The traditional way of keeping note by hands would have been impossible to do all these.
Second, it can sort out different notes by its categories. We could tag a specific name to a note, and under that name we could make many notes, when we want to see this category of note, we could just click the Tag button to have a list of different tags, and then click the tag you want, you would access to the all the notes in that tag. If we want to find notes that were recorded by hand, it would have been more time consuming to find the right one.
Third, after we made many categories of notes, it lays out in Evernote in a very clearcut and logical way. For example, we could trace the notes according to the geographical location in which we wrote that note by clicking Atlas (as shown in picture below15 notes were written in Wenham) , and if we look at it regularly and think about it, it produces different knowledge flows that inspire us to form new thoughts and ideas based on these knowledge.
Fourth, if we update our Evernote daily, it would become a good habit. If we keep our tasks, classnotes, daily thought and ideas regularly, after a year, we could see a pile of notes taken, and it gives us a great sense of achievement. Particularly, if someone has made some mistakes, by taking down notes, it would prevent us from making the same mistakes again.
Fifth, Evernote could also be shared online such as Facebook, Twitter, or email. It could also be presented and share with friends to get feedback by clicking the "work chat" icon on the left column.
Overall, Evernote has saved a lot of my time, and has kept many good things that I would not have been able to keep in my head by memorising. I could summarise that the best way of organising and managing knowledge is by keeping notes regularly, going back to the note and think regularly, putting into practice regularly. A teacher definitely needs this tool to enhance their knowledge base, and increase efficiency.
