conferring · record keeping · technology

Conferring Notes Go High Tech

Stacey Shubitz

There are a variety of record-keeping apps, which make it possible to monitor your students’ writing progress. Confer, DailyNotes, Evernote, and Notability are four popular apps that promise to make it easier, dare-I-say a pleasure to maintain meaningful conferring notes on all of your students.

Have you made use of any of these apps in the past? Please leave a comment, sharing your insight, so other folks can get some tips for how to make their conferring notes go digital in time for the 2013-2014 school year.

Published by Stacey Shubitz

I am a literacy consultant who focuses on writing workshop. I've been working with K-6 teachers and students since 2009. Prior to that, I was a fourth and fifth-grade teacher in New York City and Rhode Island. I'm the author of Craft Moves (Stenhouse Publishers, 2016) and the co-author of Jump Into Writing (Zaner-Bloser, 2021), Welcome to Writing Workshop (Stenhouse Publishers, 2019), and Day By Day (Stenhouse, 2010). I live in Central Pennsylvania with my husband and children. In my free time, I enjoy swimming, doing Pilates, cooking, baking, making ice cream, and reading novels.

11 thoughts on “Conferring Notes Go High Tech”

  3. I use Evernote to keep track of my conferences. I create a notebook for each child and then tag the notes so that I can easily find what I’m looking for. I was so excited when I threw away a bunch of binders this year. Now that I use Evernote, I can keep track of all kinds of information both for school and personal use.

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    1. I use Evernote in a similar way! I’ve even used the audio clip to record the child reading and then let them listen back to themselves. It is really helpful when working on fluency for the student to hear themselves before we work and then afterwards, so they can listen and compare the two audio clips (using the same page or passage). I use tags to track different reading concepts that we cover during our conference as well as reading levels and books the student is reading. This makes it easy to sort students into groups by concepts or by the books they are reading.

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  4. I have also used Confer. I like it a lot however before using it this year, I want to think carefully and come up with a set of pre-set notes and tags so that my use of it can be streamlined and faster. I love that I can record kids reading levels and create mini-groups that way. I’m going to look at some of the others mentioned — finding the best tool for me would be great.

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  5. I used Confer for the first time this year. I used to use binders with tabs for each student, but found as the year went on the binder became cumbersome. I love confer. I am able to see all of the teaching points and notes for each student at a glance. The app even lets you group students if you choose.I highly recommend the app to anyone who needs go take conference notes!

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  6. I had tons of fun visiting http://www.KustomNote.com! You can create your own templates or browse pre-made templates and revise them so they work best for you and your students (there are many for reading and writing conferences). Another awesome site is http://www.ifttt.com (if this, then that) for “recipes” that make connecting different tech tools easy! With one click, I connected my KustomNote & Evernote(www.evernote.com) accounts. Now, whenever I use a KustomNote template, it automatically syncs with my Evernote account. The best part? There are no more papers to lose and it’s easy to tag and find everything!
    http://www.evernote.com
    http://www.kustomnote.com
    http://www.ifttt.com

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  7. I used a tabbed Word document last year. I liked that each child had a tab. I didn’t like that I had to track the dates I met with students separately. I am going to try Evernote this year.

    EmilyK

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    1. Emily, In Evernote, you can create a notebook for each student, then create tags within the notebook for reading, writing, etc. I love using Evernote for meeting notes, phone call logs, and more, but many of my teaching colleagues really love using Confer. Confer Lite is the free version of the iPhone/iPad app. You can try before you buy! Have fun!

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