:emergent learning

In the past I have used Google Notebook as an online personal productivity system.  It has worked really well, especially sharing my inbox with my wife!  I can’t recommend this application anymore because development on it has ended. I really like the online notebook idea.  A student could use a wiki of course but a true online notebook works in a way that is a bit different than a wiki, especially the use of tags and headers.  I am currently recommending evernote as an alternative.  I began recommending it due to the fact that I allow students to use their cameraphones to take pictures of our whiteboard/smartboard mindmapping, planning, and research sessions and they needed a place to park these pictures online other than our class wiki.  Evernote has many uses.  It has an iPhone app and can work with smartphones.  I now have students who use evernote to keep track of notes, images, videos, and interview mp3s.  We began talking about it just today in terms of it being a useful tool as they go to college.  Being able to have an online notebook free from a computer is very useful if you are going around campus to different computer labs doing work.  I am currently moving information over to Evernote.  I believe an application like this is very helpful to a student who may be a strong holistic thinker who makes connections easily but organizes poorly.  Evernote can help that student see visually all the research and notes, manipulate those notes and then make decisions.  Combining this with a touch screen could be very helpful to a kinesthetic learner or a visual learner.  Because of this I believe Evernote has the potential to be a very powerful learning tool.

Technorati Tags: evernote, google notebook

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