Using Evernote ® as an Interactive Notebook with Pre-Service Social Studies Teachers

Teacher educators are expected to create experiences for pre-service teachers to prepare them for the world of teaching and the ever-changing contexts of schools and teaching. In this article, we discussed integrating two different aspects of teacher education—field-based instruction and technology—through the use of Evernote ® , a digital note-taking and archiving application, to create digital interactive student notebooks. Our goal was to provide other practitioners with insight into our use of Evernote ® to address two different pedagogical goals of a field-based course: 1) to enrich our pedagogies through the use of a digital interactive notebook with pre-service teachers who were spending more time in Pre-Kindergarten-12 social studies classrooms, and 2) to teach pre-service teachers to use a particular cloud-based technology that could be implemented in their future classrooms. We described Evernote ® , how we used it to work against the notorious theory and practice gap in teacher preparation, and discussed the importance of taking the time in teacher education to teach technology to digital natives.