LessonNote

I am an education consultant and author that works with schools on personalized learning through learning labs. This app is invaluable for observation and feedback in learning labs. It is absolutely worth the investment, even if you’re not doing Lesson Study or Learning Labs. You can keep track of lesson observations and link student work with them directly. Do not hesitate—try it out and you will be hooked.

I have seen nothing else like this for classroom observation. Instead of a bunch of checkboxes, sliders, and the like, this app invites you to focus on what is most important: the students and how the lesson is impacting them. Based on a seating chart (which you can set up really fast), you take handwritten notes about what students (and the teacher) are saying and doing. You can insert photos of student work. You notate changes in modality (e.g. whole-group vs small-group or individual work). After the lesson, the app makes it easy to talk about what happened and when – every note is time-stamped and linked to the seating chart so you know whom it is about. And yes, there are some statistics if you want those: how long each segment of the lesson was, how many notes you have for each person, and the total duration of those notes. Some things could make it better: "undo" is so slow as to be unusable, and there is no eraser. But this app has really improved the quality of my post-lesson conversations with teachers. This free (FREE!) app blows everything else away. Thank you!

I love this app and I use it to help my student teachers on a daily basis. I would highly recommend this app for any teacher with a student teacher to take notes in a proficient manner. I would make 2 recommendations for it, though. First, when taking notes, have the option of typing the notes as well as writing by hand. Secondly, have an option to import items of different importance and export the notes through lesson note to Dropbox, or pages, etc. Otherwise this is an awesome app.