At a Bay Area education hackathon that I wrote about yesterday, my team of three ran into technical difficulties implementing SLC’s API and couldn’t enter the competition. We still worked away nonetheless. Here’s the concept:

Clevernote (code name): A note management app dedicated to rushed note-taking for educators. Allowing educators to use autocomplete tags like “@” for student names (think Twitter) or “struggling”, Clevernote makes sense of the data you don’t have time to organize.

Problem:

• Lack of organized notes: Teachers type out as much as they can as quickly as they can without time for organization.
• Lack of lesson plan integration as a result of 1) messy note-taking and 2) notes being in separate files/formats than the lesson plan, notes don’t influence future lesson plans enough.
• Long-term knowledge loss: That valuable information is never organized and passed on.

While I was teaching ESL in Hong Kong, I struggled to jot down every detail I wanted to remember. These included self-reminders, content for qualitative student evaluations, and general observations. Many of my fellow teachers and I simply dumped all of our thoughts into an unformatted page-long Word paragraph after each class. Sifting through the block of text was a headache.

Current solutions like OneNote and Evernote are great for meetings, but simply aren’t intended for rapid free-form note-taking when you only have five minutes before your next class.

Solution: Clevernote

• Easy spur-of-the-moment organization in the form of name tag recognition (@) and keyword tag recognition (groupwork, disruptive, helpful)
• Easy post-note-taking organization with drag/drop text into tags/categories/buckets and teacher reporting and assessment integration
• Lesson plan template tab to create LPs informed by relevant student and class notes

Two simple mock-up pages I made:

The homepage emphasizes a blank canvas. As you type, the app will automatically recognize tags such as names.

Here is a student’s page. It includes all notes that mention (or tag) the student, filterable by tag.