Stay calm and make your notes beautiful!

About a year ago, I received a tip from our special education teacher about a service called Google Keep. One of the reasons why I love it is that it has a speech-to-text function that makes it easy to add notes on the run. I have been using the tool for about a year now, and it is the best tool for notes I have used. So simple and so beautiful! Here is a guide that will make you an organizing-ninja in no time.

An organizing app that actually works!

Google Keep is basically a tool that helps you have different notes in organized in one place. You can make different post-it notes for different things, or collect different types of notes in the same Keep. This makes it easy to create to-do lists or gather information. Since Google Keep is also available as an app, it is easy to pick up your mobile phone and type or talk in a note at any time.

Canva provides a more beautiful experience

So far, there is not much that distinguishes Keep from other organizing tools. ToDoIst and similar apps easily handle the same thing that Google Keep does. What distinguishes Google Keep from the others is that it is possible to make it look really nice! By adding pictures to the different Keeps, it looks really nice and you will smile when you look at it. I have created my overview images with a service called Canva.com.

Canva is one of my favourites for easy layout because it is easy to use and creates beautiful images and ads with just a few clicks. You start by choosing a layout from different templates. This layout will be the base that you may alter as you like. If you want to add images, the easiest way to do so is to visit Pixabay.com. Pixabay is a site where creators can share all kinds of images without traditional copyright and you pay as much as you want when you download. You may take pictures for free as well.
When you download the images it is better to choose one of the smaller formats. If you have too many large sizes images in your Keep it may become a bit slow, especially on a mobile device.

I started by creating six different images in Canva for my different classes. Once you have selected the layout and created the first image in Canva, you can quickly change the background image and text five times to get six variations on the same theme. After that, I made a picture for to-do list, one for administration and one for subject-specific notes.

When all the images are ready and it is time to upload them to Google Keep, you start by clicking + and then click on the image icon at the bottom of the page. This means that the image ends up at the top of the post-it note. You can add a headline at the top and start filling the Keep with important information.

Remember to be careful about writing students’ names in your notes if you live in Europe with the GDPR legislation. Keeps are best for short, educational notes on how far we got in the last lesson or things you need to remember. Another absolutely great feature is that all the links you add to various Google documents create a small icon for the document under the post-it note. It makes it extra simple to see where you have placed everything!

As with everything else in Google, it’s simple to share a Keep with a colleague or why not with one or more students. For two teachers who share a class, it is great to always be able to see what the class did yesterday and how far they came.

Google Keep is one of those tools that really simplify my life and I highly recommend it!

TIP! Many to-do apps have a feature that allows you to set reminders with alarms. One thing that impressed me with Google Keep was that you can also set alarms for different places. I tried to write “print attendance forms” and under “alarm” I set the school address “May Street 6, Norrköping”. The next time I went to school, I heard a ping in my pocket and the app reminded me that “now you are on May Steet 6 – Print attendance forms”. The app used the GPS in the phone to know where I was and reminded me of my errand in the right place instead of the right time!

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