LessonNote User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience65.2% of reviews
Neutral17.4% of reviews
Negative experience17.4% of reviews

~ Based on 23 written reviews from the US App Store.

Is LessonNote Safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess LessonNote.

Is LessonNote Legit?

LessonNote appears legitimate, with a few gaps. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for LessonNote is 73/100.

Based on 73 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Invaluable for Teacher Feedback

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.
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No typing function

Please could this be added? I won’t be using it without this function.

nothing touches it

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!
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Even better if...

A clever app but seems to be missing an obvious feature...add in the option to type notes with the keyboard. This would make it a full observation tool!

Innovative, but poor quality writing

I was really excited about this app because I've been looking for a free (or at least non-subscription based) app for observations within classrooms. I love the concept of the app, and the structure of capturing information tied to a student, teacher, etc.

Tapping on a student and entering individual notes is a great idea and prevents the issues I've had running out of space to write notes near a student's name.

That being said, the responsiveness of the app to input leaves a LOT to be desired. Writing with an Apple Pencil results in blocky and largely unreadable text - the app just doesn't track the stylus with enough (or much of any) precision, which renders it basically unusable.

Hoping for an improvement - would love to use the app, but can't currently!
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Response from developer

Hi danlang, I know it's been quite a while since you wrote this review, but we've just released LessonNote 4 which makes serious improvements to the note taking and writing system. Particular to your comments, LessonNote now officially supports Apple Pencil®! We'd love for you to give LessonNote another try if it still fits into your needs. Thank you! The LessonNote Team

Powerful app

I used this in my ITT training when observing other teachers. Seasoned teachers were amazed at how much information I had about their lessons. The hardest part was the setting up of the classroom and if they changed around a lot during the lesson.
One colleague used it to monitor who he spoke to during the lesson so he could ensure everyone had the equal amount of attention
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Very good app

I am a university tutor and do a lot of observations. This is a really convenient way to record interactions between participants in class. It would be great if there was an option to use the iPad keyboard, as it is much easier to type than it is to write. Also, not all classrooms lend themselves to a 'portrait' orientation, so using the auto-rotate feature would be good as well.
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An invaluable app for a math specialist

This app has provided focused and timely conversations with teachers about the time they spend talking vs. their students, the types of questions they are asking and how their students answer and documenting key visuals needed for deep collaboration.

Great for observations

I am a teacher educator and use this for classroom observations. It is a great way to illustrate what is happening in the classroom. Would like option to type notes while observing.

Response from developer

This is a frequent request. We believe that carefully observing students usually requires standing up, where one can easily see what they are doing/writing. Using a keyboard usually requires sitting down. We will, however, continue to consider providing keyboard support as an option. Thank you for your feedback.

Great tool

An excellent tool that serves the goal of documenting the structure and dynamics of a classroom. A chief goal I have is to be able to provide a lot of objective data from a classroom observation. Once I learn to deliver this data via email or other means, to the teacher, I'm sure I will employ this app quite often.
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Review

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.
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Getting better and better

Each new release adds features and improves ease-of-use. Indispensable for classroom observation and Lesson Study work.

Needed feature

This app has great potential! There needs to be a way to export the lesson notes to a .pdf file so that the information can be shared. Also, a landscape mode would be helpful.

Response from developer

PDF export began with version 4, and is much improved in version 5. We are testing landscape support, so that should be out soon, too!

Update

I just downloaded the most recent update following the supposed bug fix. I did not do the update earlier because of the warning that I would lose all my data. Not only have I lost access to all my data, but now the app will not even open to record new observations. I tried emailing support using the link on their website, but it came back as undeliverable. Do not download the update!
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Response from developer

It has been a very long time. We are truly sorry for your loss of data. Please try the latest version, version 5. It is very stable and so much better than version 1.

Good App, but...

This is a great observation app for school administrators.m the seating chart creator is simple, easy to use, and very useful when taking data on what's happening.

There's a few things that this app needs to move from good to great:

* Keyboard support. Some of us type with thumbs faster than scribble with a finger. This addition would be invaluable.
* Exporting. For documentation purposes, being able to print these out would be great, even if we could email them in PDF form.

A few additions would really make this app top notch.
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Response from developer

PDF export is available now! Regarding keyboard support, this is a frequent request. We believe that carefully observing students usually requires standing up, where one can easily see what they are doing/writing. Using a keyboard usually requires sitting down (we hadn't considered typing with thumbs). We will, however, continue to consider providing keyboard support as an option. Thank you for your feedback.

Assistant Principal

Everything an observer needs when using the Danielson model. Classroom set-up, interactions amongst teachers and students is wonderful. The timer, transitions and the ability to add comments to the pictures is genius ... BUT you can't share it!

Simple and effective

This app does almost everything that I want and I simple to use. However it would be nice to be able to name the students, maybe in an update this could be added. Thanks

Good Start

Like others have mentioned, it would be great if there was an export feature so the notes could be shared. Also, the option to use a keyboard would be helpful.

Response from developer

PDF export is available now! Regarding keyboard support, this is a frequent request. Using a keyboard usually requires sitting down. We believe, however, that carefully observing students usually requires standing up, where one can easily see what they are doing/writing. So we don't want the app to encourage users to sit down. We will, however, continue to consider providing keyboard support as an option. Thank you for your feedback.

Okay but could be better

This is a great way to observe. However it needs to allow for landscape view and keyboard use. It would also be good if you could send the notes or put it in a word document to print it to do observational write ups. Great concept just needs some tweaking to make it great!

Major potential

Right now there is no way to name students or tables, they just go by a number assigned to them. Adding this simple feature would bring this app to the next level.

I would also like to select multiple objects in edit mode and perhaps have a way to straighten up a selection, but I could live without these two features.

I REALLY want to use this tool but without names it is worthless to me.
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Response from developer

Naming students etc. was implemented at least by version 2. We are now at version 5 – please try it!