Save It and Save Yourself: Evernote

Whether or not you are technologically savvy, you have probably lost some vital piece of work at some point in your life because of technology. There is nothing more irritating than completing your thesis or finding that perfect resource for class... only to discover the next day that it has disintegrated into invisible 0s and 1s somewhere out in the great digital unknown.

So, whether or not you are technologically savvy, I have found a few sites that will help you preserve all your favorite teaching resources.


Evernote:

Evernote is a digital notebook that really looks more like a scrapbook. It allows you to save webpages through a type of screen capture, so even if the link breaks somehow out in the Internet, your sample of it is safe. Of course, if only one small part of the page is relevant, then you can simply highlight it and save it, which also works well with pictures. You can access everything you capture from any computer--or a hand-held device like an iPhone or BlackBerry with these downloads.

All this content can be sorted into separate notebooks. I have one for EFL, and one for RFL (Russian as a Foreign Language). I thought of breaking it down even more into the four skills, but it isn't necessary. Just like you can "tag" people in a photo on Facebook, you can write tags under each entry and find them by typing the tag into the search bar. Every political cartoon I've saved is under "rhetoric," "cartoon," "politics," "culture," and "discussion." If I type in just one of these, all my cartoons pop up.

But what's even better- I don't have to tag a lot of content aside from that, because the dialogue in the cartoon does it for me. If two characters happen to mention zombies in their quote bubble, then Evernote can decipher the text and bring up the cartoon when I search "zombies." It even works with hand writing! The only thing that could be better is if it understood Cyrillic letters, so I wouldn't have to tag as much on all the pictures of Russian plaques I took, promising myself I would read when I got home.

Price: Free, unless you want to upload pdfs. You also get a lot of upload power. But if you find you need more and really want to save those pdfs, you can do so for just $5 a month.


Registration Help:

1. Click here to "Get Started."
2. Enter your information. Before you really get started, you will need to check your e-mail and click a link the site sends to confirm it is a real address.
3. Once you enter your notebook, you can create notes from scratch using material already on your computer, or you can download the Web Clipper, which will allow you to copy information from sites.
4. For more help, visit the support page or feel free to send a comment my way.