This is a guest post from Shep McAllister a contributor at Hack College and a student at Trinity University in San Antonio, majoring in Communication and Political Science. Hack College is a student powered website educating students of the world about effective, open source software, putting techno-political arguments in everyday language, and creating a cult of “Students 2.0.”
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Name: Shep McAllister Blog: Hack College Twitter: @Shep979, @HackCollege |
Those of you that are already Evernote users can speak to how flexible a tool it is and the variety of situations it can be put to use in. It’s no surprise then that although Evernote wasn’t necessarily designed specfically for students, it might as well have been. I’ve found it invaluable in school, at my internship, and for the website HackCollege. From what I can tell I’m not alone, a growing number of students seem to be joining the club. The modern college student has a lot more on his or her plate than just classes, and Evernote is the perfect application to save time and help you juggle your many responsibilities.
10 Great Ways Students Can Use Evernote to Study Smarter, Not Harder.
- Take notes in class – This one seems like it should be obvious, but I can’t believe how many students still type their notes in multiple programs to deal with the availability problem. Evernote keeps every class note in a single application, making it so much easier to scan through several days’ worth of notes the night before a test.
- Go paperless – If you’re anything like me, you probably have trouble keeping track of the handouts teachers like to pass out. You can use a scanner, or even your phone’s camera, to quickly digitize your syllabi, project descriptions, and graded papers so that you never have to worry about losing the original copies.
- Portable textbooks – When studying for a test, sometimes you only need your textbook for a few charts and graphs. Instead of lugging that 1000-page monster to the library, just scan or take photos of the pages you need into Evernote, and access them online in your favorite study spot.
- Handwritten notes – As great as typing your notes can be, there are still some classes where handwritten notes are all but required. Once you are finished, always take a quick snapshot of your notes and paste it into Evernote, allowing you to access them anywhere. Never again will you have a minor heart attack when you spill coffee on your notebook.
- Manage your different lives – Students are so many things these days: scholars, interns, friends, club presidents. You can set up different notebooks in Evernote to give these activities their own space, but everything will still be in a central hub. It’s like having filing cabinets that are with you everywhere.
- Never forget a number – You’re asked to remember a lot of random numbers as students, especially at the beginning of the school year. It helps to keep your student ID#, mailbox combination, and even friends’ room numbers in Evernote, at least until they’re safely burned into your memory.
- Window shopping – Students love to buy new things. Unfortunately, we usually don’t have very much money. Next time you see a pair of jeans tempting you from outside your price range, take some pictures of the display rack and the tag and store them in Evernote. You’ll have no trouble finding the items again once you coerced some money out of your parents.
- Make PDFs smarter – A lot of school libraries will now scan short readings for classes and distribute them online to students. This cuts down on textbook costs and prevents students from competing for the library’s one copy of the book, but these PDFs are often of low quality and won’t let you highlight or scan for keywords. If you want the files to be a little more searchable, just drop them in Evernote and let the text recognition go to work. (Searching within PDFs is a premium only feature, view all of the premium features here).
- Record important lectures – Professor speak a little too fast? Want to capture his hint-laden test review discussion in its entirety? You can record audio notes on your phone or iPad right in Evernote so you can rest assured that you won’t miss a thing.
- Organize your research – We have to juggle a lot of information sources when researching a paper. Evernote makes it easy to drop all those links, PDFs, charts, and book scans into a single, easily searchable notebook. This beats the pants off frantically searching your hard drive and web history for sources when you have a due date looming.
Evernote Education Series
- Evernote at School: The Montclair Kimberley Academy’s 1:1 Program, plus Q&A Webinar
- How Evernote helped me through college
- How my students started using Evernote
- 10 Tips For Teachers Using Evernote
Join the discussion about Evernote for Schools on our forum. Learn from educators and share your own experiences, best practices and tips.
