Yesterday, in an email announcement, Evernote opened up Evernote Business for education.
My first look at Evernote Business was when I attended last years Evernote Trunk Conference and heard the announcement of this new service. While the focus was clearly on the “business” user, the offerings were very appealing to educational institutions as a whole and I was very excited.
Outside of the classroom schools function a lot like a business. There are groups of people meeting to go over projects or initiatives, various offices that have information that they need to share amongst their members as well as school-wide (company-wide) information that needs to be disseminated. The offerings in Evernote Business allow school to do this much easier.
Here are just a few of my early thoughts on how Evernote Business might fit into your school (K-12, college and university).
What might Business Notebooks look like in a school?
ACADEMIC OFFICE: Consider an academic office that is working on a new curricular initiative or program within the school. There will be a team or teams of people working on the materials, training resources and other collateral materials (web sites, picture clippings, audio notes, etc.) that will need to be shared. By creating a business notebook you can share this information easily with the entire team. How this differs from a standard notebook is that if the person that created the notebook leaves the school/institution that business notebooks stays… the school owns the notebook!
ADMISSIONS OFFICE: Admission offices have a lot of potential students that they are meeting and interviewing on a daily basis. The information on a student first comes in via a phone call, the web or an email and then is added to by not only the admissions officers, but the classroom teachers, coaches and other faculty a potential student may meet with while visiting the school. Once the student has gone through the entire admissions process that information then needs to be shared with an Admissions Committee and those committee members need to add their notes, tags and comments as well. Notebooks for individual students can be created to hold all of this and shared with the team.
[NOTE: I spent time in the late Fall 2012 working with the Greenhills School Admissions Office and Betsy Ellsworth on using Evernote to try to move to a paperless admissions process. The work that we did then is what Business now allows you to do much easier.]
ADVANCEMENT OFFICE: Fundraising is a big part of any school and making sure everyone is on the right page with a campaign, current project, a particular donor or any ongoing solicitations is very important. The collateral materials that are produced in support of these efforts is enormous and knowing what has been done and sharing that with the appropriate people is key. With all of these materials and information finding just what you need can save time as well. The ability to use Evernote’s powerful built-in search tool, along with it the related notes feature will help better coordinate efforts and save time within any Advancement office.
But what about the Business Library?
If you consider the amount of materials that needs to be shared school-wide with all of the members of the school and it’s offices it is astounding. Having a centralized library where information is easily searchable, shared and extended is key to the success of any institution. The ability to share resources that are available to EVERYONE within your school with a press of a button can help increase communication, understanding and productivity.
Institutional organization and sharing is taken to the next level with these two “business” features!
There is more to Evernote Business then just these two additions. If your school used the “sponsored groups” feature of Evernote before there is a new onboarding process that make things much easier.
Evernote has provide a lot of information for schools on both eligibility and pricing (75% discount for education). They also clearly spell out their policy on COPPA and the responsibilities for schools using this service. Evernote Schools provides even more information as well.
My school will be using Evernote Business this year and for the foreseeable future. I will be sure to continue to post more of my thoughts and experience as we continue down the road with Evernote.
I am always interested in hearing what your thoughts on All things Evernote so please comment below and I’ll be sure to respond.
[Image Credit: http://evernote.com/media/email/2013/07/070113_Education_eduintro_EN_USCA.html]
