If you’re like me, you’re constantly finding cool education ideas and things that you want to learn about – later, when you have time. I literally find things daily. For a long time, I struggled with the best ways to save them so I could easily find and access them later. Here are a few of the things I tried…

  • Screenshot & save to iPhone photo album
  • Google Keep
  • Email them to myself
  • Evernote
  • A Google Drive Folder with subfolders

Each of these had organizational problems for various reasons, and none of them ever worked for me all of the time. I had some things in my iPhone photos, but when I found Word documents while I was on my work laptop, I generally stuck them in a Google folder. I threw some things in Evernote, but I never really fell in love with it. I got really good at putting everything in Google Keep for awhile, but it soon was a jumble of everything – despite all my color coding and tagging. I kind of had things all over the place, and I kind of tried everything.

I HATE being disorganized, and I hate losing resources.

Then came the holy grail of organizational tools, and it works for me all the time, on every device, for any type of resource (photo, article, link, interactive media, video, etc.). It’s Microsoft’s OneNote!

I created an awesome little notebook that I called “PD for Me”. I actually did this right from my iPhone, because it’s the device I use most often. Then, I created sections in that notebook. If you’re not really familiar with OneNote, it works like a digital binder. The binder is called a notebook, so my OneNote notebook’s title is PD for Me. Within a OneNote notebook, I create sections – and the sections are like those tab dividers that you would normally put in a binder. Within sections, I can put pages…and I can even create a second tier of sub-pages if I need to. Below is a screenshot of my PD for Me OneNote notebook. (There are several more sections below AR & VR – I can have unlimited sections and unlimited pages, so I really take advantage of that!)

As you can see, I can set the color for each section tab, and I also usually add an emoji to each section title because it makes it more visually appealing it helps me to find it more easily.

As I said before, I spend most of my time on my iPhone, so that’s where actually end up doing a lot of my resource curation.

Tonight, I was on Facebook and found a great resource I want to save to my Seesaw folder. I opened it in my Safari browser in my phone, and then clicked the little “send to” icon as shown below….…and then just choose OneNote from my send options.

From there, it just asks me into which notebook and which section I’d like to drop the resource! It’s so easy! Similarly, I can take any photo (or screenshot, of course) from my iPhone, choose that send option, and repeat the process…just choose OneNote.

So I’ll show you one last thing. Let’s look inside my Seesaw section to see the pages I’ve put in there so far…

I wanted to point out four fun features in the page image above…

  1. I can still add emojis to keep things fun
  2. I can make subpages (indented) to maximize organization
  3. See the little checkbox in the lower right-hand corner? I LOVE checkboxes! I’m addicted to list-making, so I use this all the time!
  4. The camera icon lets you snap a photo of any class project, sign, screen, idea, magazine page, etc.! It embeds right on the page! See why I love using my iPhone for this?

My “PD for Me” is just one of a gazillion notebook ideas. I can create unlimited OneNote notebooks, so I choose OneNote for work and even personal organization- Holiday Planning, Recipe Collections, Vacation Organization, and so much more!

OneNote – It’s the answer to ultimate on-the-go organizational convenience!