Notability

One of the things I love about Notability, besides when I got it for $.99, is how many different things you can do with this app. The more popular it gets, the higher the price it gets.
This app allows you to:

• annotate PDFs
• Record audio
• Save to and import from Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box
• write or type documents
• among many other great features

I have been using this app for a majority of the school year.  I started the year writing out my guided reading lesson plans on paper, but wanted them to be in a format where I could easily send them to others or refer back to them without having to look through stacks of papers or in folders. I finally turned to the app Notability.  


I first started out by creating a template for my guided reading and then saving it to Dropbox as a PDF.  I have created numerous templates throughout the year and am still tweaking it to meet the needs of my students.  I'll attach one of the ones that I've recently used at the bottom of this post.  Once the PDF is in Dropbox, I open up Notability and then import that document by creating a new note. I would suggest renaming the file based off the group and the book being read.  As soon as it is open, you can easily write on the document using a stylus, which is what I have done a lot in the past.  

*I will be posting another post in the coming weeks about how I will approach my guided reading plans for the following school year.

You can organize all your lessons based off of your guided reading groups.  Below you will see that I group my students into the colors of the rainbow.  These are like my digital folders for each group that I can refer back to when I need to see what has been covered and what strategic actions I need to work on to have them become stronger and move up in reading levels.


You can also use create folders for each of your students, which I have done.  There names are below the purple group.  I color code them based off their groups.  As you can probably tell, I like to keep my digital files organized since paper organization is not my forte.  When creating these student folders, you can take a digital running record.  If you have a PDF of the reading passage, you can upload that file to their folder and then write on the running record using your stylus.  Another great feature about Notability is that you can also voice record.  I have used this because I believe that is important to sometimes have your students hear what they are saying in order to help them along with their individual reading goals, especially in terms of decoding.

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