Notion - FREE Note-taking App for Teachers and Students

hi there Jamie Keith here today a teacher's Tek hope you having a great day today so to start off 2020 we're gonna be talking a little bit about productivity actually I have a special guest coming on teachers tech and his name is Francesco from keep productive a fantastic Channel all about productivity he goes over so many apps do check it out if you're looking at some of the best ones out there he has them all but he's taking a look more specifically today in this video about notion and how it can be used for teaching and for students to keep everything organized and the great thing about this app is that it's free for students and teachers so if you're looking at getting organized for 2020 do check this out a lot Francesco take it over from now and check below for all the links if you're looking to check it out even more hello folks my name is Francesco thank you very much to Jaime for having me here on today to talk to you guys about notion for educators for teachers and what we're doing today is exploring around this application the great thing is this application notion is free for educators you can get a personal plan if you want to and I'll include a link in description to that which is great news because if you're are an educator and you are eager to use this application after this video then you can take advantage of that plan now a lot of questions are being asked about what is notion and hopefully I'm going to answer them for you today what's going to show you a few templates that you might be able to take away and use for starting to plan some of your classroom activities but before we begin I just want to say a big thank you to Jaime from teachers tech for inviting me here on a channel you should subscribe to his channel if you're new here if you want to find out more about my work I run a channel called keep productive you can subscribe to it it's here on YouTube and I'm sure journey will add it in the link in description if you want to learn about notion a little more we do have a course with an educator discount of student 50 if you add that one you'll get 50 dollars off which is great news so as you can see here we are with notion now as you can see it it's very blank and the real amazingness of notion is that you can design it to however you want to use the application and you're probably wondering how do I go about doing that now it's really simple you give your page a title in this case we might create this as our home page this is where we're going to start from and start building our own layout now the best way to describe notion is it sort of like a website an intranet per se allowing you to create whatever sort of structure you like so for example you could create pages for your lesson plans you can create and organize a to-do list you can manage some upcoming events using a calendar you can basically build it using these things called databases so let's go ahead and create this homepage now once I enter obviously it will create a brand new fresh page and what I'm going to do is add an icon and I come to neat way to sort of get started I can add an icon of a home there so let's say I wanted to go ahead and start creating a brand new calendar for the upcoming semester making sure that I'm understanding and seeing all of the future events for my students and what I need to be doing each week so what I'm going to do is I'm going to press the slash command now the slash button opens up what these things called are blocks now blocks are basically ways to insert different things you can insert a new page you can insert to-do lists headings bullet lists toggle lists quotes but the real magic is when you go ahead and scroll down to databases there is a range of different databases that you could add you can add a table a board a gallery a calendar and even a list view which is extremely useful so in this case we're going to go ahead and create a calendar in line so as you can see there really magically a calendar has just popped up ready to be used now if I wanted to I could go ahead and just delete this and if I wanted to as well is I could create the entire page to be dedicated to a calendar so I can press one of these and magically that appears now the great thing is you can do a whole lot here I probably won't make it as sort of detailed for you when it comes to that but let's just start adding some events and activities to this calendar so for example if I know next week is half-term or a break from the semester maybe I want to add in break now what's really cool is I can you know give it a tag if I want to and whatever I want to add I can add a property so for example I can add maybe a number a multi-select a person who it's associated to but let's not make it too complicated right now let's go ahead and add a lovely icon and let's call this one a nice break maybe we're going camping for that break so let's have a little tent so if I go out of this you can see that the break appears there and I'm going to say the breaks a week long so that's perfect I can see all of that there now maybe you've got a really important exam for one of my classes here I could put exam and what I could do is I can add an icon and type in school maybe and there we go I've got the graduation hat there and what I can even do is go below here and start adding some more details about the exam if I wanted to so over here I can actually select tags on so you can see that this card is a property is a holiday and this card is I can actually put it for the students and then even I can go out of this and maybe begin to plot the staff party so I can add another icon and I can put a party maybe there'll be pizza there and I could say that probably is part of the staff so you can begin to see although this is a very simple explanation of the calendar you can start planning your actual activities that are coming up which might be extremely useful but the magic word notion is you can do way more than that now for example if I wanted to go ahead and create a brand new page I could for example create a new lesson plan or lesson planner so this might be useful when you know you have no an idea of some of the lessons that you want for the semester and you want to begin to plan them so I'm going to go ahead and create a table now a table is already a good example cuz it's sort of like an Excel spreadsheet but here we go I'm gonna give this column title of lesson so that I have the title of the lesson ready I can even change the column next to it to top it so that I can add whatever topic it's relevant to okay so I've maybe added my topic I maybe I want some files to be associated with it so I could say class materials so that the students know what they're getting but I can add lots more properties to this now it's really cool there's a range of different properties whatever I want to choose is actually a date for the date that's coming up for this one so I can move this one along make it a little bit smaller and put date I can even add more properties as well and it's really useful to be able to maybe annual Rell's phone numbers and even people to associate it to if you're working with your colleagues so in this case I'm gonna go ahead and delete this one because I don't actually need it and I can start planning this lesson so I might want to say this is on gonna be on the theory of relativity and I'm gonna open this one up so we can start planning inside of here I can add an icon that could be science related so maybe a microscope I can even add class materials so for example if I wanted to embed a link maybe for them to go away and read for example here the Wikipedia page might be useful although I don't recommend that and I could say next Tuesday is when I'd like the lesson to be and this would be on science so down here I can begin actually ABing the details I can start adding them in bullet points maybe but one of the biggest time savers that people found with notion is to utilize something called date templates if I create a new template anytime I go below each of the pages I can basically replicate whatever that adds so for example I could be like lesson template and below here I could start creating an area just using the slash command to create a heading maybe you want to say what is the main objective of the class and add a divider below that to neaten up and maybe I want to put useful videos for the class and add a divider just below that so that's perfect because what I could do is I can move that next to it and I'm ready to go on the lesson template so when I'm inside of this new theory of relativity

I can click on this lesson template and bang I instantly get the main objective and the main objective is to understand the basics of Einstein's theory and I can start adding useful videos so in this case I can actually embed YouTube videos or Vimeo videos so that the students can actually click in and watch these or I can actually just send them to them directly so I can start organizing and planning future lessons so the real magic in notion is if you're really wanting to get started with some of the basics they actually have a template section if you click the template section there is an education section that's dedicated so for example you could have a classroom home which allows you to have all of your syllabus schedule required text assignment sections contact an office hours and even announcements for your students and even a lesson plans this is a much

better one that I created allowing you to have a very specific broken down concepts for each of the learning objectives class design and some of the closing remarks and even a course schedule allowing you to actually plan in future topics and readings that you

end up giving to your students and even a class directory of some of the other

teachers in a school for example so take advantage of those templates you can find them there using templates and all you have to do this press use this template and you can start um basically deleting the information is already in there and start adding your own so that really can become extremely helpful when it comes to organizing your own lesson plans and getting started on notion now notion is a little bit tricky when you get started if I'm honest there's a little bit of a learning curve but once you find some value from it and once you continue to persist in learning it I think there is a huge opportunity for you to save time effort many of you may be using Evernote or OneNote and for basically planning and coordinating your activities this is a good solution allowing me to do a range of different things if you want to email me directly if you're a teacher educator or even a student looking to advance your learning that notion email me directly I'm happy to answer any questions you have and maybe explain it to you in a bit more of a simple way because sometimes it can be tricky and obviously you're sort of breaking down those barriers is pretty important so guys thank you very much I hope you enjoyed this tutorial notion thank you to Jamie for having me here on teacher stack and if you want to subscribe to keep productive you can and check out the course if you're interested but thank you very much and I'll talk to you guys in a future video I don't keep productive and I'll pass over it back to Jamie for regular uploads here on teachers tech thanks guys see you later