Google Keep for Teachers: A Quick Start Guide

If you’ve visited my site before, you know how much I LOVE using various Google apps to organize and save time in teaching.

If I was asked to choose a favorite app, one of the very top contenders would be Google Keep.

I cannot begin tell you enough how powerful Google Keep for teachers truly is. When used purposefully, Keep can become a way to, well…keep track of literally EVERYTHING in your teaching life!

So today I want to share a quick start guide to get Google Keep going for you…in no time!

This guide is ideal if you are new to Google Keep and setting it up for the first time…or if you are looking to organize your Keep more effectively.

Let’s get started…

Google Keep for Teachers

Here’s a quick look at everything we will do right now.

It’ll be important to follow these steps in order, as I’ve set this up to save you as much time as possible…always my goal for you!

Open Google Keep.

If you haven’t used this free app before, you will have a blank page as shown below:

The easiest way to create instant Google Keep organization is to use labels first.

Click on Edit Labels. 

Type your label name and click the checkmark to save it:

Not sure where to begin with label names?

It helps to think of labels as an outline of your teaching life. 

If you make a label for every part of your teaching, you will have a place for all notes. Think of important topics such as…

• subject areas
• conferences
• meetings
• assessments
• events
• field trips
• celebrations
• important dates
• professional development

Feeling a bit overwhelmed with setting up labels? I have a time-saving resource to help you plan your labels in just minutes in my course, Make & Take Tech: Google Keep.

Now that we’ve set up your labels, we’ll work on color coding them to help find things fast!

There are two options to add color to your notes in Google Keep.

OPTION ONE: Use Preset Colors

Google Keep features 11 colorful choices to make your notes pop.

To choose a color, click on a note and head to the palette icon. You can use any of the preset colors:

There is also a feature to add a header image…you can even change the color and the header image:

We cannot use our own color codes, unfortunately.

However, there is a workaround if you’d like some more customization…

OPTION TWO: Color Code with Your Own Headers

This is my FAVORITE option because I like to color-code my labels with brighter shades. It’s such an easy (and beautiful!) way to create instant Google Keep organization!

All it takes is designing some headers in Google Slides. You can design the exact header you’d like and upload it right to your Google Keep notes:

Want to learn more about designing headers for Google Keep? Click here to learn how to create custom Google Keep headers.

Or if you are in a rush, I have a whole set of headers ready-to-go right here.

Ok, time to talk about the text formatting for your notes.

Or lack of, actually.

There is currently no way to change anything in Keep text…no bold, no underlining, no font choice.

No worries!

There are some workarounds to help with this. Let’s get started!

LINE BREAKS

Line breaks are one of my favorite ways to make my notes easier to read…they break up all that bland text so nicely!

Just press your Shift and dash keys at the same time to create a nice solid line. You can size it to be the exact width of your notes.

This makes different sections of your notes easier to read:

BULLET POINTS

Even though Google Keep doesn’t come with a bullet point option (I still can’t believe this!) we can add them. And…

Once you add a bullet point and hit the enter key, it will keep creating a bulleted list for you as type!

There are a couple of options to create bullets. You can…

• use the dash key to create a lined bullet
• copy and paste a bullet point right into your notes

EMOJIS

Another way to make those notes really easy to read is with emojis!

Head to an emoji site like Emojipedia to copy and paste them right in…they will make your notes so much easier to see on the fly:

Once you have your notes styled as you would like, you can create templates to use again and again!

Create the outline of a note template, leaving space to customize the text later on:

You can then copy this template by clicking the three dots at the bottom and Duplicate:

And this is really just the tip of the iceberg! There is SO much you can do with Google Keep…beyond simple note-taking.

I rely on Keep to manage all of my teaching information, from meetings to student notes to important dates and so much more.

I feel so strongly about the power of Google Keep organization for teachers, I created a quick course to help you set up an entire management system in no time!

You are busy enough…I have resources, shortcuts, and everything prepared for you so you don’t even have to think. You can just relax and design your own beautiful Google Keep management system.