Collect digital submissions directly to Evernote

Evernote makes life easier. It's been central to my going (mostly) paperless and compiling student portfolios. Because my students don't yet all have Evernote--I'm deciding still if I'd like them to--I've had to devise a workaround to automatically collect their submissions into my notebooks.

I'd be interested to hear why the folks at Evernote haven't made this any easier. It could be they're worried about security, and/or that they're pushing a model whereby everyone has Evernote and just shares notebooks. (That's how it's done at Montclair Kimberly Academy)

My trick begins with the unique email address that Evernote grants every user, and their system for coding an email's subject line to file it in the correct notebook with your desired tags.

Since I don't know any code, I had to look long and hard for a web platform to create what I wanted: an embeddable form that could collect file submissions and send an email with the files attached, drawing on users' responses for the subject line and body text. JotForm was my favorite, but their free offering couldn't handle my number of submissions per month. (UPDATE: Looks like EmailMeForm and JotForm now have the same limit of 100 free submissions/month. Darn)

I eventually settled on EmailMeForm.


Let me walk you through the process:

I want to file submissions into notebooks by class section, and I want them all tagged "unread"

Here's what it looks like to build the form on EmailMeForm. For security, you can change the properties of the File Upload box(es) to only accept desired file types (e.g., .doc, .docx)

EmailMeForm allows you to craft the email notification with the form responses

Use "Dynamic Tokens" to populate the subject line with users' form responses (in this case, their name and their class section). Don't forget the @ before the desired notebook name, and # before the desired tag

EmailMeForm helps you out with the dynamic tokens

Here's what the resulting email looks like:

Here's the final form, embedded on my homework site:

And here's the resulting note in Evernote: