On the subject of tools that support professional development and research by helping you to keep you organized, I thought I would share two of my favourites, DROPBOX and EVERNOTE.
With dropbox, you never again have to worry about forgetting your USB drive/flash drive at work with that document you wanted to work on (or forgetting to email a file to yourself)! With Dropbox, you save your documents in a cloud application which allows you to access them from anywhere that you have access to the Internet. You can download dropbox to all your computers and mobile devices (for you IPad, Iphone and BB users), and any files saved to the dropbox on one device will be automatically synchronised to all your devices. For a more comprehensive overview of the tool, CLICK HERE for a review by TechGeek. To set up a Dropbox account and download the app, CLICK HERE.
EVERNOTE
Evernote is promoted as a program designed to make your life easier. It is one of a number of web-based tools (another popular one being OneNote) that allows you to keep and organise notes in one program that syncs to just about any device, making it easy to access your notes from anywhere. For a student, these might be lecture and study notes; for faculty, they might be notes on research projects, course notes or even "Notes to self". Notes can be in text format, audio or video. You can even add your own handwritten notes if you use a tablet; add images that you take with your mobile phone or other digital device; add links directly from relevant web sites or send email messages directly to your Evernote folders which are called notebooks etc. The idea is that you create notebooks for all the categories of notes you are going to keep, and then you can easily "throw" notes into those notebooks ( or access them) from your home computer, your work computer, or your mobile devices once you have Internet access. For a full overview of the tool here's link to the source, the Evernote site where you can setup and account!
I recently attended a workshop where all materials were made available to participants via Dropbox. Last minute changes to the schedule and presentations were simply made on the source files by the facilitator and the changes were synchronized across participants computers. Dropbox notified me a few days after the workshop that new files were added to the folder. Prior to this workshop, I considered Dropbox only as as a replacement for my USB memory stick.I think that greater use can be made of this technology in teaching. It has some advantages over email with regard to large documents and frequent revisions e.g. theses.
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