Sundry Notes in the Classroom

Our district has fallen in love with Sundry Notes! Sundry notes for teachers, Sundry Notes for students, Sundry Notes for administrators... yes, sometimes one size does fit all! Earlier this year, one of our district teachers started using the program and shared it with a friend who shared it with another until a wildfire had erupted. Along the way, one of the teachers decided to use it with his students. During a campus visit, I saw what his students were doing with it in science and decided to try it out myself. It didn't take long for me to find the pleasure in the app as well, so I too passed it on. We decided with so much interest, we ought to show the administrative council during a meeting. Many of them instantly saw the potential as well and Sundry Notes was added to their iPad immediately. It's an epidemic here in McKinney! A good one.

Sundry Notes is a glorified notebook with many bells and whistles. Like many of the note apps, it allows you to take text notes. However, this app allows a lot more than just that. With the pro vernon the user can add audio, photos, tables, drawings and symbols. In addition, and this is my favorite part, the user can connect wirelessly with friends on the same network and share a document they are creating. The collaborators can then do things simultaneously while not messing up the others work. The notes can then be saved in stacks just like notebooks can hold multiple papers. Students can create multiple stacks and when they are ready, share it with others in many different cloud storage locations like Evernote and Dropbox. The sharing can allow the teacher to grade the document and allow the student to share it for others to see as well. 

While many consider uploading to dropbox an added step, you will find that the students will catch on extremely quickly and the benefit of easy storing a bonus. Most of our teachers using this have created a classroom drop box and given each of the students a folder. The students then upload their documents to their folder while not interfering with anyone else's work. Although it is not a private storage amongst classmates, it is not available to those who aren't logged in. To clarify, a teacher would log into the account on the student devices making it unavailable to those without a logged in device and without the password (ie. the teacher). If you are concerned about a student erasing another student's work, it is possible to do. It simply takes some classroom etiquette standards to ensure this does't become an issue. There is always one, but he/she also eats their pencils and loses their library books... fortunately, we never give up hope on them!

All in all, it is a fantastic App. It has many app competitors and some are great apps as well. But to my knowledge, nothing does it quite as well as Sundry Notes. There is a free version to test out and you can certainly get your feet wet with that, but if you have a few pennies in the change jar, throw caution to the wind and invest in a great app today. You will use it next school year!