On Tuesday, Maureen Breeze presented the webinar Parenting Tips for Academic Success: Promoting Success at School and at Home to a delightfully responsive crowd. Among Maureen’s many tips, she presented ideas on how parents and educators can help get students organized. She suggested:
- Make lists
- Look through backpacks every day
- Use “in” and “out” boxes
- Encourage your child to:
- Use a trapper keeper
- Keep track of assignments in a day planner
- Create assignment logs for each class
One parent asked if she knew of any online tools for organization and we decided to open the question to our teacher and educator populated audience to help answer. Our attendees told us they use Engrade, Evernote, and BackPack with their students so we decided to look into these online organization tools and share what we found out.
- Evernote:Â “Put your thoughts, ideas, inspiration, and things to remember all in one place. Use Evernote for work, for play, and for everything that’s noteworthy.”
How it works:
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- Students “capture” what they want to save. It can be a photo, a webpage, a screenshot, or a note reminding them of their homework due next week.
- Their captured information is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If they want to get really organized, they can make different notebooks for all their classes have their captured files upload accordingly.
- When they log on to Evernote.com they can search for their files by keywords, titles, and tags.
- Backpack: This online organizer allows students to keep all their files in one place and share their information for group projects and collaboration. Backpack differs from other online organization tools because you can easily add and reorder content on a page, whether it’s a list, photo, or file and share instantly with the people they’ve chosen. The only downside seems to be it isn’t free.
- Engrade: A free online gradebook for teachers, parents, and students.
- Teachers can use this tool to:
- customize grade scales
- hold online discussions with students
- message students and parents in a SPAM-free environment
- create a homework calendar
- assign online quizzes that are graded automatically
- track attendance
- make online flashcards and build wikis.
- Teachers who use Engrade give their students and parents a private access code for the class so they can login at any time to see:
- grades
- homework
- assignment scores
- class grades
- attendance
- and send messages to their teacher.
- Teachers can use this tool to:
What online tools does your student use to keep organized? Do they prefer to handwrite their homework to-do list or type it online?
If you are interested in viewing or downloading the PowerPoint from Maureen’s presentation, click here. On March 29, Maureen will present Parents as Coaches: Helping your Child Succeed in School and Beyond. To find our more about this free webinar and to register, click here.
