219: Organizing Digital Homeschool Resources with Brooke Poston

Our guest in this episode is Brooke Poston from Homeschool Resource Co who has some great tips to share on organizing digital homeschool resources.

Brooke explains what she means by digital resources and supplemental content and where one can find this content. She then details how to create an inventory spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Finally, she breaks down the 3 main ways to organize content and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Listen to the episode for some easy-to-implement ideas.

The workbook and course on Digital Organization Brooke mentions

• Workbook
• Course

The digital resources Meryl mentions are

• FundaFunda’s web-based unit studies
• FundaFfunda’s Teaching Resources which include Printable games and digital breakouts

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Take a look at show sponsor, FundaFunda Academy to see what they offer for online classes and web-based unit studies.

Join our Facebook Group especially for the listeners of this podcast! You can ask questions and get advice as you try integrating technology in your homeschool.

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84: Evernote online filing system with Rachel van der Merwe

The guest for this episode is Rachel van der Merwe, a Ph.D. candidate in media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Rachel has four years of teaching experience at the undergraduate level and currently teaches the upper-level course Media and Popular Culture for CU Boulder. She is also my daughter and the teacher of the Visual Literacy class for show sponsor, FundaFunda Academy.

What is Evernote?

The Evernote app describes itself as a digital notebook, but Rachel thinks it’s more helpful to think about Evernote as a digital extension of your memory—an external hard drive or archive for the central processing unit that is your brain.

Evernote for Homeschoolers

Evernote has many uses within the context of homeschooling, or really any educational setting,

Some useful features are:

1. You can take a photo of a page of notes, or business cards at a homeschool convention, and save it as a note

2. You can create notebooks for each course, inside the notebook

• Drop any articles/PDFs/lesson plans
• Drop in audio files and images too
• Use Tags “to read” “read” or on the subject matter or content
• Can add reminders to notes

3. You can take notes in notes
EN has its own annotation system built-in. You can open up a PDF and highlight, underline, jot down notes, draw arrows, etc in an assortment of colors OR you can open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat or Preview, annotate there, and when you save and close the PDF it automatically saves to the file in Evernote.

4. Organization

• Notes are stored in notebooks, notebooks can be placed in stacks
• Each notebook can be private or shared.
• Each student could have a notebook for each class and maybe your kids would organize their notebooks in separate stacks for each semester.
• You as a parent could have stacks for each of your kids

5. Relocating info
You can find items you have saved using

• notebooks/stacks
• tags and geo-tags
• dates

With Evernote Premium, everything is OCRed and becomes searchable – even handwriting!

6. Evernote Web Clipper
Whenever one comes across something online, clip it and tag with specific keywords and choose which notebook to add it to.

If you want your teens to learn how to use it, this is one of the resources covered in FundaFunda Academy’s Computer Applications class.

Join our Facebook Group especially for the listeners of this podcast! You can ask questions and get advice as you try integrating technology in your homeschool.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and give a rating and maybe even a review! Subscribing will help you make sure you never miss an episode.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More