I’m continuing on with the learning fallout from the Bring IT, Together conference.
Those that we in attendance for Steve Dotto’s presentation will recall that he gave us a free gift – a subscription to his online course for Evernote.
I’ve used a lot of notetaking applications over the years. Every time there’s something “new” or this is a “game changer”, I do give it a shot to see if it will change my game. The problem is that my game is pretty simple. I just want a notetaking application that takes notes. Is that too much to ask? Lately, though, I find that it’s handy to have an application that listens and takes notes. If you’re a dog walker, you can probably appreciate that your mind tends to wander, or as I call it, get creative, and it would be nice to remember what you’re thinking.
On my watch, I have Keep, Evernote, and OneNote so I have a variety of ways to record notes. I’ll toss blogging ideas into Keep and the other things into Evernote. It’s nice to know that I have OneNote as a backup if needed. The nice thing about an audio input is that you truly work them all the same way. With a cloud-based solution, it’s just so nice to be able to log into the application on a computer and follow up on the actions.
What sold me on Evernote?
It was one of those applications that comes along that you try and say, ok, that’s neat. But, it was Danika Tipping’s presentation “Making it Easy with Evernote” that convinced me that this was worthwhile investigating further. At this link, you’ll find a link to her webinar and the presentation in Slideshare.
In the big scheme of things, my use still pales when compared to her ideas.
I’ve even played around with IFTTT integration to capture relevant social media events in my absence. That gets big in a hurry!
For me, it’s still mainly a great place to store all my conference notes, meeting notes, to-do lists, etc. When I dig through what I capture, I’m always amazed at what’s there and I wonder how many ideas I’ve forgotten over the years without a good digital notetaking assistant.
Yet, I still have that voice in the back of my head that reminds me that I could be doing so much more with it. So, I’m hoping that Mr. Dotto’s course will serve as the kick in the pants that I need. I like the fact that it emails a lesson a day and you just save the lesson into your own Evernote space. That way, the learning or refreshing can happen at any time.
If you were at the Bring IT, Together conference, consider taking advantage of this offer.
doug --- off the record 
I use Evernote a lot in my personal life – I liked the sugar cookie recipe in the visual because Evernote tends to be where I create the digital cookbook I want eventually to pass on to my kids, as well as tracking the lists of what we bake for the annual bake-a-thon, but I haven’t used it a lot in class (although I regularly refer to it with my students). Interesting….
And thanks for the reminder. I had forgotten about Steve’s offer – despite the fact that I wrote it down in the Evernote note I made during his keynote. I think revisiting is the biggest opportunity this kind of tool gives us.
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