• Name: Alex Karpman
• Profession: Entrepreneur
• Location: Los Angeles, CA
• Website: www.datevitation.com
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/datevitation
• Twitter: @datevitation, @alexkarpman

Bio:

Alex Karpman is the founder of Datevitation, a company on a mission to inspire couples to be more romantic and have fun together. His website hosts an abundance of date ideas, videos, and custom love coupons to help you be more creative with your special someone. Alex shares how Evernote and Skitch helped him with his business, and even helped him plan the perfect proposal to his fiancé, Olga.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• Mac
• iPad
• iPhone

I use Evernote + Skitch for…

Planning the Perfect Proposal with Skitch

I first met Olga on a plane in 2005 and felt an instant connection, but we were both in relationships at the time. We stayed in touch, and when we found ourselves single last year, we reconnected and started a relationship. I quickly fell in love with Olga and her daughter Eva, and knew I wanted to make them a permanent part of my life. I started to cook up a plan to propose to Olga in a way that would include Eva, too, and make it a special day for all three of us. I finally settled on constructing a huge sand castle so Olga could be my queen and Eva could be my princess.

As you can imagine, this wasn’t a simple task and I needed to enlist the help of a sand sculptor to make the proposal perfect and a videographer to film the whole event. I initially set up set up a conference call to get the whole thing planned, but after a long and frustrating conversation I began to feel that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. It was so tough to get my point across, and I knew that if anything in my plan was off, the magic of my proposal would be ruined. Then, I realized how much more simple Skitch would make the whole process. I searched images of the beach where I wanted to propose and marked them up with Skitch to show where I wanted to build the sand castle, how I wanted to approach it with Olga, and where I wanted the videographer to be positioned to catch the looks on Olga and Eva’s faces. It took no time at all to do this, and both the sculptor and videographer instantly understood exactly what I needed. I couldn’t have been more pleased with how my plans turned out, and both of my girls said yes! You can watch my proposal to Olga and Eva here and see firsthand how, with the help of Skitch, I was able to pull off this incredible proposal.

Evernote for Everything Else…

I used Evernote to clip ideas and do research when I was buying a rental property and doing renovations. Being able to save and search for every little detail is really handy when you have a lot of smaller things to keep track of.

I save places I want to visit in my Evernote account – when I get to take a vacation, I already have a lot of ideas and planning at my disposal. Getting away is so much easier when I’ve done the work in advance!

Whenever I want to make a bigger purchase or get a gift for Olga, I like to do a little research to make sure that I’m getting just the right thing. Evernote lets me keep all my ideas and information in one place so that I can make sure I’ve thought of everything when I finally make my decision. Check out my blog to see more about how I use Evernote for picking the perfect gift!

Making My Business More Efficient

I was a lawyer for 5 years before I decided to make a change and pursue a radically different career as an entrepreneur. Starting up a business requires a lot of organization – I was constantly communicating and sharing ideas with my designer and developer, and I needed tools to make sure we were always on the same page. Evernote and Skitch have helped me coordinate with all the various parties I’ve needed to work with to make my ideas into reality.

Gathering Inspiration

As I worked on fine-tuning my vision for how Datevitation would look and feel, I used the Evernote Web Clipper to save articles, designs, and ideas that inspired me and kept them in a notebook that I shared with my designer. This way we both could view all these resources anytime we needed to reference them for a part of the design process.

Skitch has taken a lot of the hassle out of giving feedback on projects. Before Skitch, I would spend hours crafting ridiculously long emails to my developer to describe exactly what I wanted. Usually, I wouldn’t be able to get my point across 100% correctly anyway. Now, I just snap quick screenshots and use arrows or circles to indicate exactly what I want moved or changed on the website. Having the ability to visualize what I’m trying to say is critical to communicating with my team, and it has saved me an incredible amount of time and money.

Bio

Kevin Buran teaches 6th and 8th grade science to students at Carmel Middle School.

I use Evernote, Everywhere:

• Mac
• iPhone
• Web Clipper

I love…

• ScanSnap Scanner for scanning in worksheets and student work
• JotNot for taking snapshots of my daily itinerary and saving them instantly to Evernote

I use Evernote for..

I first heard about Evernote about a year ago, but have become an avid user much more recently. Here are just a few of the ways that I use Evernote for teaching:

For sharing information with my students

• Recently, there was a landslide in my area which blocked the roads and kept students from school for several weeks. Evernote’s Shared Notebooks became a simple way for me to give students a way to access class notes, worksheets, PowerPoints and labs. Even though they couldn’t make it to class, they didn’t fall behind. [How to start sharing in Evernote]

• I put everything my students might need to access —worksheets, articles, and labs — into a Shared Notebook that they can access through a link or via Moodle, a service that our school district has integrated.
• I have a Scanscap scanner, which I use to shoot worksheets straight into Evernote. Sometimes, I’ll scan student work that I think was particularly impressive. It’s a great way to acknowledge the work and share it with other students (via Shared Notebooks).

For research and labs

• Before Evernote, I was bookmarking so many different websites for research purposes, or sending emails to myself with links. I found it so difficult to keep track of things I was reading on the Web. Now, I use Evernote’s Web Clipper to simply send things I want to remember to my Evernote account, where it is completely searchable and accessible whenever I need it.
• I recently had all of my 8th grade students sign up for an Evernote account to help them do research. They clip articles from the web, take notes and track lab results in Evernote.

For extending the classroom beyond school walls

• I put up a daily itinerary on the whiteboard for my students to see what we’ll be working on that day. For anyone who isn’t in class, I snap a photo of it and put it in Evernote. You can see all of the past daily itineraries in my Shared Notebook. I use JotNot to take those shots, which integrates really well with Evernote.

• In the past, I’d come across interesting things related to topics we were studying in school (like environmental problems) that didn’t specifically fit into the day’s lesson plan. Now, I save articles and even video links to Evernote, where my students can see how their studies relate to the ‘real world.’

• Our school, like many, is considering going to a 1:1 model. We’re trying to figure out how we can incorporate technology into the classroom in a more integrated way. The fact that Evernote can be accessed from virtually any device and syncs across devices means that no matter what technology we choose, teachers and students can continue to access all of their notes from anywhere they happen to be. [Learn more about 1:1 deployments]

User Tip

I like to keep my Evernote account clutter-free, especially for my students. I’ll occasionally go through my account and move notes around to different folders or delete them. My Shared Notebooks are always up to date and organized in a way that makes it easy for students to find what they’re looking for.

Join the discussion about Evernote for Schools on our forum. Learn from educators and share your own experiences, best practices and tips.