Week 6 Report

Hey everyone,

I can’t believe we’re already at the mid-way point for this course! The semester seems to be flying by. This week the topic was Collaborative Notes and Documents. Once again I was not familiar with the various collaboration and note taking tools available online. Throughout my 3 years at university I’ve only ever used Microsoft word to take notes and store information. Having completed this session I’ve become aware of various tools that make the note taking and research process so much easier and organized.

Let’s start by determining what it means to have collaborative notes and documents. This tool allows us to work on and add to our notes from any device that has access to the Internet. You can access documents you were previously working on and pick up right where you left off. This is extremely convenient for students who often work on assignments from various devices. Not only can you type in your own notes, but also you can save information directly from the web. The greatest feature is that you can share your notes with other people. This comes in handy for when your doing a group project.

Retrieved from: http://evernote.com/evernote/

The collaborative tool I explored this week was Evernote. When I was first getting started with Evernote I have to admit I had a difficult time trying to figure out how to use it. It took me a while before I got the hang of it, however the site provides a number of tutorials to make the learning process simple. You can store a number of things into your Evernote account such as notes, to do lists, camera phone snapshots and emails (Hamilton, 2010). I also found it neat that you could use this tool with some of the other tools we discovered in the course such as Twitter.  One of my favorite things about Evernote is that is automatically saves your notes and syncs it with all your devices. This means you don’t have to worry about forgetting to save your latest document or worry if your computer randomly shuts off (one of a students biggest fears!).

This is a tool I definitely see myself using even after the course concludes. I believe it will make the process of searching for information and writing papers an easier and more organized process. I can also see myself using this tool with other classmates when working on a group project.

When thinking about where I would place this in my PLE I think I would classify it under research, as I believe it will be most useful to me when I’m working on a research paper. Being able to store all articles I find in one spot, or having the option to save a part of an article I find important adds a convenience level that no other tool does. I was also thinking about adding a “production” category to hold things like Microsoft word, PowerPoint and Evernote.

To conclude my post this week I’d like to share an article I found on my Feedly. I thought it would be useful to those who have really taken a liking to blogging and wish to perhaps make their blog more successful. The post is titled "3 Lesser Known Blogging Tips to Create a Massively Popular Blog"“ Enjoy!

References:

Hamilton, B. (2010). http://www.slideshare.net/theunquietlibrary/introduction-to-evernote-fall-2010