The Evernote Experience

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

Hi everyone,

This week I discovered a very practical tool called Evernote.  In the past few weeks we explored various different tools meant to accomplish mainly one thing (bookmarking, curating, etc.) but Evernote has the capability to do most of those things in one convenient place.  You can use it on your computer, tablet or smartphone and the information all gets synchronized to the cloud so that it is accessible everywhere and on all your devices.  Let's face it, maintaining numerous and various different tools for individual purposes can be painful and time consuming. Streamlining your PLE will be an ongoing process that you will have to do regularly after finding new tools and abandoning  others.  As was mentioned before, your PLE is an ever changing and living entity that will only get better with time as you keep improving it, personalizing it but also maintaining it by keeping only the tools you actually use.  That of course doesn't mean you can't have a collection of bookmarks for tools you don't personally use or currently use in case you want to use it or recommend it to others down the road ;o)

Coming back to Evernote now, you will want to add the "clipper" tool to your browser in order to maximize its potential. The following video showcases how the clipper tool works on the Chrome browser but it is also available for the other common browsers such as Firefox and Explorer.




Once you've signed up and are ready to go, create a notebook on any topic of interest and add notes to it at any time from your browser whenever you come across an article, picture, video or link of interest to name a few of your options.

Once you've curated information on a given topic in a notebook, you can share it by making it public or what's really nice is that you can also share it with specific individuals.  One of the major downside is that you need to pay the fees for the premium membership to have access to the collaborative features that allow others to modify and add notes in your notebooks.

Evernote is a tool that can do so many things that it becomes hard to determine in which category of your PLE it should be but I would personally put it in information collection and creation because you can do both with relative ease.  I also like how I can access and add things on the go via the mobile app.  Personally, I also found it nice to be able to clip text out of a webpage or article because it provides more context than just adding bookmarks with a title and makes for a nicer experience when curating and sharing.

As we discover more and more tools together I'm really happy with the way my PLE is expanding but mostly I'm excited about the feature rich tools I'm now using as they make my learning journey more rewarding but also they will help me increase my digital footprint as I begin sharing my notebooks for instance.   It has been a goal of mine to increase my online presence and Evernote may just be the tool that will finally push me to do so. 

What about you, have you been using Evernote for some time? Are you new to it? How do you use it and why do you like it? Share your insight with the rest of us.

As final note, I've been using the Feedly RSS mobile app for quite some time now and keep finding good information on a wide variety of subjects.  The tip I would like to share with you today is a little trick on how to customize image size in your Blogger posts.  Click here to find out more about making sure your images always look exactly like you want in your blogger posts.

Take this opportunity to do a fall cleanup of your PLE by keep it up to date and relevant.

Mathieu Leclerc 

Building Your PLN and Microblogging

Retrieved from: http://www.danpontefract.com

This week we explore how to expand your Personal Learning Network (PLN) and the use of microblogging.  We've already explored blogging in its typical form which consists of posts on blogs like the one you are reading right now but what is microblogging? Wikipedia defines microblogging  as a blog post that is much more limited in size. Microblogs involves the exchange of small elements of content such as short sentences, images, or video links.

Twitter, which is probably the most popular tool for this purpose, is the tool that I set out to explore for this purpose.  In his video available here, Brad Flickinger suggested that you should follow at least ten people on twitter to build a decent PLN and gives good advice on how to pick quality sources.  The only problem is that I haven't found very many people to follow that don't either; post tweets that are irrelevant to education or that are doing what is known as hyperblogging which means that they bombard you with so much information that you can't possibly keep up.  Because I was determined to follow ten members I looked past some of these filters and added the ones I felt shared the most interesting information.  I also decided to follow the #edtech list since everyone who posts something with that hashtag should pertain to education technology.  Maybe following that list will also allow me to find good members to follow.

I must be honest and say that the only reason I gave it to the little blue bird they call twitter was because many of the sites I visited regularly had contests they ran using twitter and because some companies release promotions there first.  I don't follow it regularly and my experience going back to it in a bid to expand my PLN reminded me exactly why I was never a big fan in the first place.  The rate at which people post tweets makes me wonder if that is the sole reason for their existence.   Most share good information but if I'm following ten of you who post a tweet every hour or two that means that I'm being sent 10 tweets an hour for 12hours (assuming most people tweet more during business hours) that means that I receive a minimum of 120 tweets a day.  ignore it for a couple of days and you can imagine how quickly that number rapidly grows into an unmanageable amount of tweets to even scan through for what could be good information.  Worse yet is when allot of it is good information. 

I knew that the process of building my PLN would involve the discovery and use of many different tools but I now accept the fact that they won't all suit my style or meet my needs.  So far I've learned that curating content and using twitter are NOT approaches that I am drawn too.  It doesn't mean that I'll give up on them, it just means that I may need to revise what I want or expect out of such tools.  I've followed some of my coursemates as suggested and upon reflecting about the my PLN I realized two things; one being that what I want from a PLN is interactions with people I've come to know and appreciate instead of just being bombarded with information by someone I don't even know. The second was that, in a real work environment, it takes times to make good contacts and network with reliable people that you can trust and who's opinions you truly respect.  That being said, it will take time for me build a quality PLN but as this lifelong building process continues, I will build a solid network of people that make the experience an enriching and rewarding one.  It needs to start somewhere but instead of going on a wild goose chase on twitter to find members who post good quality tweets, I would advise you to start closer and add some of your favorite teachers and go from there.  You'd rather start small and receive a minimal amount of good information that start big and get discouraged like I did but hopefully you can learn from my experience.  Start small and remember that networking doesn't happen overnight. 

To conclude I'd like to leave you with an interesting post that I first saw on my Feedly but that has also been shared by many on the twittersphere.  It's about the use of colors and the meanings behind them.  We've all seen slideshows where attention to the use of colors was well thought out or very poorly implemented from a visual standpoint. Have you ever considered what messages the colors in your slide might be conveying?

Retrieved from; Free Technology for Teachers

All the best with your PLN!  Feel free to share some of the people YOU follow as part of your network.  

Mat

Cloud Bookmarking and Content Curation - Week 4

Leclerc, M. (CC) 2013

This weekly exploration of tools has me torn between one that I really see a use and practicality for and one which I find has failed to grab me.   Let's get more in depth about both of them.

Cloud bookmarking is a great way to save your favorite bookmarks where you can access them anywhere regardless of which device you are using.  Your bookmarks are no longer trapped locally on your favorite browser.  I picked Delicious to fulfill this duty as it allows to add bookmarks to the cloud fairly easily from my favorite computer browser and has a pleasant interface. 

What I find most appealing so far with my use of cloud bookmarking is that when you add a bookmark it tells you how many others have bookmarked the same link before.  You can add personalized comments to your bookmarks and add tags to group them together or access them faster once you have a very extensive library.  When the bookmark is common the site suggests tags to you based on what others have used in the past.  These tags also allow you to search other bookmarks that have been tagged using key words like; education, learning, science etc. 

Now as it relates to your PLE, which we have discussed in an earlier post, cloud bookmarking is a really good asset.  Most of the tools in your PLE will be Web 2.0 tools which means they will be part of your cloud bookmarks and therefore available anywhere.  With the amount of tools at your disposition and with the variety of tools you may have as a part of your arsenal, it would be hard to remember them all, especially those you use on a less frequent basis so go ahead and "cloudify" them so they are always just a few clicks away and while you're at it, do a quick search to see what the rest of the world is bookmarking.  Great sources of information are hard to find so once you've clicked your way to one you like it's really important to save it for future use and what better way to expand on that then by searching what others are bookmarking for the same uses?

On the other hand, I'm really struggling to see as great a benefit from curating content.  I can clearly see why this is being used in business and marketing tool but struggle to find a way to use it that would validate the time spent curating.  It seems to be a great tool for sharing and involving social media in a way that cloud bookmarking doesn't.  I can see where this would be beneficial if my digital footprint was already well established but as it is in its infancy I don't yet feel like I should be focusing on broadcasting content.  Then again this was one of my biggest challenge when after realizing that this is an area in which my PLE lacks muscle.  As I transition from a spectator to a creator on the internet, I can see how curating content would increase in relevance but in the mean time I'm tentatively dipping my big toe in so to speak in the hope that I'll warm up to the ideal. 

Overall I I would file these tools under Accessing information/Spectator banner of my PLE even if curating shows signs of creation, all that is really happening here is content repackaging and propagating.

I would like to finish this post by sharing an exciting news bit that pertains to the future of technology in education.  If you are as big a fan of using new technology in education as I am then you will be glad to hear that Google is invested in rivaling Apple in the educational tech space.  This will certainly lead to great innovations that learners will benefit from as a result, find out more here.

Please share your comments as to why you've invest in curating content, I'd like to hear what you have to say.

Thanks and happy leaning.

Mathieu Leclerc