If you’ve been using a smart phone for a while now, I’m sure that you have stumbled across, fumbled with, or heard about the thought management app known as Evernote. Those of you who use it daily know how fantastic it can be for remembering fleeting ideas, storing pictures, and clipping interesting web pages for further mental digestion. Those of you who don’t know what Evernote is can think of it as a digital trunk where you can put ANYTHING–notes, pictures, drawings, audio recordings, or web pages–to reference later so that you don’t have to fill your personal ‘trunk’ (thus the elephant logo).
What’s so wonderful about Evernote is your ability to use it however you want; however, that’s also what makes it so daunting for users new to the platform. I could speak for pages about Evernote and how it can help any higher education professional, but what I hope to do with this section of the blog is intermittently break down how to use Evernote for various tasks related to our occupation. As the title implies, today we will be talking about high school visits and how Evernote can help you track your travels.
Now, if you’re like me, you have an unjustified and unrelenting sense of trust in your short/long term memory. Need to buy eggs? Nah, you don’t need to write it down; you’ll definitely remember. I mean, how could you forget? The next morning you realize you have to eat in the University Commons because you are as forgetful as you are eggless. Now, somehow extrapolate that tangential anecdote to high school visits. Chronicling and detailing high school visits is paramount to ensuring that we are maximizing our time (and budget) with the right outreach strategies. However, trying to summarize the high school visit right after your presentation can be nigh impossible if you have 15 minutes to drive 30 minutes away to the next high school. Alternatively, you might miss out on some smaller but important details if you try to recall the visit later that night while you’re winding down back at the hotel.
That’s where Evernote comes in. After my visit is done, I will pull out my phone, click on the text to speech button on the home screen widget, and speak away. It will look something like this:
So on and so forth. That way, you are able to speak while you drive or while you are walking back to your car–while everything is fresh in your mind. Granted, it the feature uses voice recognition, so you will have to edit it later to make it more polished. You will also have to speak slowly (a lesson I learned the hard way) or you’ll end up with something like this:
And that’s just one of the thousands of uses Evernote has for the travelling admission counselor. You can even take pictures of the high school in case that helps you find landmarks or remember what the school looked like. Whenever I have an idle thought, I will generally throw it into my Evernote so that I can organize it later. But that whole process is for another post.
J. CUSHMAN OUT.
Link to Evernote’s website: http://evernote.com/