Is There an Organization App Better Than Evernote?

This morning I was interviewed by some high school students who are researching uses for iPads in high school education. Their school is considering buying iPads for all students for the next school year. They interviewed me as one of their "expert" interviews.

In the course of the interview this morning one of the students asked, "is there a better organization app than Evernote." My answer was, "no, but there be one that is better that I just haven't tried yet." For the last 30 minutes I've been going through my archives and although I like Wunderlist and Any.do for task management, I haven't come up with one that is better than Evernote for all around bookmarking, note-taking, and media storage. So I'm putting the question to you, is there an organization app that is better than Evernote for iPad?

In the interest of full disclosure last week I was so frustrated with Evernote not syncing correctly on my iPad that I did uninstall it for a day. But I found that I had come to rely on it so heavily that I had to re-install it. 

Use Evernote with Not-so-smart Phones

Evernote is a great tool for taking notes on the go with your Android or iPhone. But if you don't have a smartphone, what can you use? Evernote EV is a new SMS client for Evernote that was developed for people who want to take notes on their feature phones and save them into Evernote accounts. Using Evernote EV any feature phone that has text messaging capabilities can be used to send notes to your Evernote account. You can also use text messaging to search and retrieve notes that are stored in your Evernote account. Visit TxtEV.com to start using Evernote EV.


Applications for Education
Evernote EV could be a great tool for students who don't have smartphones to use to send short notes to themselves that they can access later on a computer or retrieve via text message. Of course, before you start having students use Evernote EV you should consider that depending upon the phone plans that they have students can incur text messaging charges on their phones by using Evernote EV.

A Free Complete Guide to Evernote

Evernote is currently my favorite service for note-taking and bookmarking. I have Evernote installed on my iPad, my Android Tablets, my phone, my computers, and I have the Evernote web clipper installed in all of my browsers. Because of Evernote's versatility I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good note-taking and bookmarking tool. One question that I often hear from first-time Evernote users is, there's so many options, where do I start? Make Use Of has just released a new guide that will answer that question and many more. 

How To Use Evernote, The Missing Manual is a free 34 page guide to using Evernote. The guide will help you use Evernote in your web browser, on your iPad, on your Android tablet, on your phone, and on your desktop. The guide is available to download as a PDF or EPub.

Evernote Adds Related Items to the Web Clipper

Evernote is the tool that I've been using to manage my bookmarks for almost a year now. I have Evernote installed on all of my computers and mobile devices. Yesterday, Evernote added a handy feature to the web clipper product. The web clipper, which is the tool I use for bookmarking, now includes related items. Now when you clip an item on the web Evernote will show you two related items from your account.

Applications for Education
I've occasionally worked with students on research projects and watched them bookmark the same site multiple times because they had forgotten that they saw it a day or two earlier. In fact, there have been times when I've done that myself. The related items feature in the Evernote web clipper could help me and my students avoid that pattern. The related items feature could also be helpful when you're trying to assemble a bundle of links around a particular topic.

How To Use Evernote for Bookmarking and More

Last night on Twitter I mentioned that I had just installed Evernote on one of my Android devices. A handful of people followed up with questions about how to use Evernote and how I use it. Here is the outline of how I'm using Evernote now. Below the outline you will find some videos about how to use Evernote.

How I'm Using Evernote
Bookmarking - When Google announced that they were removing the list option from Google Bookmarks I started using Evernote for all of my bookmarks. The Evernote Web Clipper allows me to not only bookmark URLs but also annotate each bookmark with notes for myself about each URL that I bookmark. I also use the Evernote Web Clipper for clipping sections of webpages including text and images.

Note taking - Evernote works on all of my devices and my notes are synchronized across all of my devices. I have Evernote installed on my Samsung Galaxy Tablet. Recently, I was flying home from Salt Lake City and got an idea for a blog post. I wrote out that blog post while offline then when I got off the plane and reconnected to the Internet that post was automatically synched to my Evernote account.

Pictures - I'm trying to take more pictures to use in presentations. I've been storing quite a few of my pictures in my Evernote account.

Skitch - Skitch is a great screen capture product that was acquired by Evernote last year. Skitch allows me to capture my screen (on my computer and on my Android tablet) and draw on that screen capture.

How to Get Started Using Evernote
The Web Clipper is the Evernote product that I use most frequently. The video below will get you started using it.



I also use the Evernote Google Chrome Extension quite often. The video below shows you how to use it.



For a great soup-to-nuts overview of all things Evernote, I recommend this video.


The video below is the first part of a seven part series on how to use Evernote.


Applications for Education
For students there are two distinct benefits of using Evernote. First, bookmarking online with annotations helps students not only keep track of websites they find useful while researching, it also helps them remember why they bookmarked a site. There's nothing worse that looking at your bookmarks a week or two later and wondering what it was about a website that prompted you to bookmark it. Second, by writing course notes in Evernote students can access their notes from any device that is connected to the web.

Speech to Text in Evernote

Over the last six months Evernote has become my favorite tool for bookmarking my online discoveries, saving pictures that I take on my phone, and jotting down random notes. This week Evernote rolled-out a super-useful speech to text feature in their Android app. Now you can dictate notes on your phone or your Android tablet.

Applications for Education
Speech to text could be a great utility for students to use at the end of a class to quickly record their assignments for the next class. For journalism students the Evernote speech to text capacity could be a great way to record short snippets of sound to play back and work from later.

Webinar - 11 Ways to Use Evernote in Your Classroom

A few weeks ago I wrote a short post about Evernote's offerings for educators. If that post got you to try Evernote, you may be interested in attending a free webinar about eleven uses of Evernote in education. The webinar, conducted by Evernote staff, is a free event on February 15th at 10am PST. (Yes, I realize that is an inconvenient time for most educators. I wrote to my contact at Evernote to suggest holding the webinar later in the day).

Evernote in Education

Over the last couple of months Evernote has become my favorite tool for bookmarking websites and saving files. Evernote allows me to access my bookmarks and files from all of my devices whenever I'm connected to the Internet. I also like the tagging and sorting options that I have available to me in Evernote. Before using Evernote I used Google Bookmarks. While Google Bookmarks is good, Evernote's tagging and sorting options are much better.

Recently, I learned that Evernote has an education section in which they provide examples of Evernote being used by teachers and students. Through the Evernote for Education page you can access an hour-long webinar explaining the how Evernote can be used by teachers and students.


Evernote for education webinar from Ronald Toledo on Vimeo.