For me, the Notes module of Outlook—together with a well-defined folder system on my hard drive—served the purpose others use for Evernote. Where do you keep all of those frequent flyer numbers, hotel rewards numbers, Xerox machine codes, and so forth? If you looked at my Outlook Notes, you would see an "A-C," a "D-F", a "G-L," etc.with each one of those notes housing numbers and codes for that range of the alphabet. Another note held a short bio of me, because you never know when someone is going to need to introduce you and will need some verbiage. Other notes held a couple of devotionals or motivational poems in case I was called on to "say a few words." In short, Outlook Notes held reference information I wanted to have with me everywhere.
When I found information on the Internet that I wanted to save, I was always able to highlight, copy, and paste it into a Word document. The document was then saved in a well-defined folder system within my computer's Documents library.
I didn't need Evernote. I was impressed by its ability to search not only text, but also words housed within photographs. Again, my photos were always named logically, so the file name would be turned up in the search. Evernote does include the ability to record sounds. However, I can put an mp3 file into a folder and give it a logical name. The ability to record sound, take a photo, capture text, and have all those as part of the same note...now that is starting to sound like something I might want to consider. However, I was not convinced that the need was great enough to add another component to an organizational system that was working.
A Replacement for Outlook Notes
In moving from an all-Outlook environment to an all-cloud environment, Evernote was the immediate choice as a place to house my Outlook Notes. In addition to establishing a web-based account, I downloaded Evernote to my office desktop computer, my laptop, my tablet, and my Android. In addition, I installed the Evernote Web Clipper on my browser.
Copying Outlook Notes to Evernote was easy. As a result of either downloading Evernote to my computer or installing the Evernote Web Clipper—and I am not sure which—when I right-click on an image or text, one of my choices is "Add to Evernote."
I opened Outlook and right-clicked each Note one at a time. After selecting "Add to Evernote," each newly-created note opened, where I could edit it, give it a title, and add whatever tags were appropriate.
Summary
Evernote provides me another way to store the information I housed in Outlook Notes. Now that Evernote is becoming part of my system, I plan additional uses for it. As a start, I have identified material to read that will guide me with best practice. You will probably see some of the results of what I learn posted on this blog.
For those who use Evernote, how has it helped your productivity?
3 comments:
I am new to Evernote as well but want to make it work. Specifically to "house" twitter info that I find useful or that I have my students find for various assignments. Also to "house" videos that they take of their practicum teaching experience. Used as a resource for later access. Do you recommend using multiple notebooks? Or note stacks? Or tags? Is premium service necessary? Also would like to house lesson plans here. Have you found a go to resource to help ease the Evernote transition?
For the video, I think saving them is possible, but you have to have a premium account. With my free account, I have not seen anything that would allow me to save video, although taking photos is easy. (Also, there is a monthly maximum you can upload with the free account, and using much video might use that up. In addition, there is a maximum size for any particular file.
As for Twitter, take a look at this link. It shows how to do exactly what you are talking about.
I would definitely have at least two notebooks, with one of them being called "Inbox" and it be the default notebook. That way, everything new goes into one place where you can then take a second look at it when things are relaxed and make a decision on what notebook, what tags, what additions to the note need to be made, etc.
The students may want to have a notebook for each project. One thing to think about is that an entire notebook can be shared, so when it comes time for you to grade the project, if it's contained in one notebook (and the only thing in that notebook is that project), the student could share the notebook with you.
One of the best things I see is the ability create a new note, write text, add pictures, and add an audio recording, and Evernote saves all of that in one note.
The biggest advantage I see is how Evernote facilitates saving from anywhere and retrieving information from anywhere.
I would also recommend students having a Dropbox account. To me, information which comes in bits and pieces is better housed in Evernote, such as Tweets that you want to house in a collection. Putting them as separate notes in Evernote would be better than either 1) having each Tweet as a separate Word document housed in Dropbox or 2)copying and pasting those Tweets into a single Word document in Dropbox.
Dropbox wold be a better place to house documents (term papers, for example).
Hope this helps.
Here is a great video on Evernote. It's about half an hour in length, but I learned things I could do, such as free-hand drawing that I did not know about.
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