Using Evernote in Higher Ed, with Scott Self

Dave: [00:00:00] Having a notebook application that goes with you everywhere and is available on every device can greatly enhance your teaching and productivity. On Episode 48 of Teaching in Higher Ed, Scott Self and Bonni share how they each integrate Evernote into their classes and workflows. Even if you aren’t an Evernote user, you’re bound to pick up a few tips.

Production Credit: [00:00:22] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:31] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:59] As I say in the introduction each time, this show is to help us be more effective at facilitating learning and also increase our personal productivity so we can have more peace.

Bonni: [00:01:09] And I am so excited about today’s guest. He has been listening to the show for a while. His name is Scott Self. He is from Abilene Christian University. He’s the Director of University Access Programs. He teaches for them and also supports so many initiatives I’ll have him share with you in a second but Scott welcome to the show.

Scott: [00:01:30] Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.

Bonni: [00:01:32] I was absolutely thrilled when I think we first started touching base on Twitter I believe it was if memory serves or maybe in the comments of the podcast and I got so excited about your blog that it was like the productivity soulmates.

Bonni: [00:01:50] Completely both such a wonderful tool for people that want to find ways to be more productive. So tell us a little bit how you started your blog and the kinds of topics that you start out there and for people listening.

Bonni: [00:02:01] This is Episode 48. So you’ll be able to get the link to Scott’s blog as well as all the other tools. We’ll talk about at teachinginhighered.com/48 so tell us about your blog and how you got it started and what the Focus is.

Scott: [00:02:16] Will that be happy to be the voice of a star is back in December. And it really started as something I was going to share with my faculty on campus. I’ve been running a group in our faculty development center on productivity and trying to find some ways to help support other faculty at our institution.

Scott: [00:02:36] So I kind of developed the blog for that purpose and it’s gotten bigger in its own way than just my institution.

Bonni: [00:02:43] Very quickly could you share about your role there. Abilene and a little bit about how that has also linked in with your blog too.

Scott: [00:02:51] As a Director of University Access Programs. I have a number of different external grants supporting intervention initiatives specifically for students who are low income and are first generation or disabled.

Scott: [00:03:04] Currently we have 6 programs. They range in interventions from a program that we have had a headstart campus to help parents start to think about college access when their kid is 4 years old all the way to our McNair Scholars program which many universities have that that program support low income first generation college students and research and scholarly activities toward earning a Ph.D.

Scott: [00:03:29] So we’ve got a long longitudinal scope involved in helping students think about college access. Other job besides teaching is that the disability compliance officer for our institutions so spend a good deal of my time thinking about what we can do as an institution to ensure that all of our students are able to learn.

Scott: [00:03:52] In the least restrictive environment and that all of our students have access to education including those with disabilities.

Bonni: [00:04:01] We’re going to be talking about Evernote today but before anyone presses stop on their podcast recording and fast forwards to the next one. What can you tell us about how yes we use Evernote as a tool but that it sorta doesn’t matter which no program or you might be using that a lot of what we’ll share will apply to more than that.

Scott: [00:04:24] Yeah. Look I don’t think it’s about Evernote. I mean I like Evernote. I live there and it’s useful but I think that really what we’re talking about are finding ways to use whatever technology is available.

Scott: [00:04:38] You can use Microsoft Windows you can use Scrivener you can use something like Ulysses because there are other platforms that can be equally as effective in helping kind of manage the learning system. I think one of the things that frustrates me the most is trying to use the learning management systems.

Scott: [00:04:55] I have to confess I’m a little bit biased because we’ve had four in Abilene Christian in the last five years so I’ve rebuilt the same course four different times and four different learning management systems and they go talk to one another.

Scott: [00:05:07] They don’t have conversations. One system to the next so you have to kind of rebuild them from scratch. And I think being I think the other very important component to this is you know your course development is kind of it belongs to the faculty member and having some kind of platform where the faculty can go in and manage and develop their courses in a way that’s effective for their students.

Scott: [00:05:31] And belongs to the faculty member is really important. I still use the learning management systems you know for quizzes and grades and to communicate grades and to turn working in. But a lot of the content that I’m sharing with students is being shared to a platform and it just happens to be Evernote my case.

Bonni: [00:05:48] I hadn’t realized until you just said that that was a part of your workflow and Evernote. I am probably between Evernote and Dropbox as far as these assets for my courses.

Bonni: [00:05:59] It kind of depends on what specific it is I’m trying to do. But my goodness what a difference that makes. Even if you were to link to a file in Dropbox or link to a note in ever know what’s wonderful about it is if you change that no later on.

Bonni: [00:06:15] It automatically got updated in your learning management system I think far too many of us are uploading files to our learning management system only to have them change down the road and then we forget to update them also and they have the wrong version or what have you.

Bonni: [00:06:28] So I’m all about keeping my course assets out of the learning management system to the extent that that’s possible to do and having it live somewhere else. For me I started out using Microsoft one note on a tablet computer.

Bonni: [00:06:43] That was one of the early note but programs that I used and what I loved about it that I think I would love for Evernote to have these two things that it doesn’t have today unless you do a work around. And that is I would just love to be able to pick up a stylus and start writing on an Evernote note.

Bonni: [00:07:00] And I know I can do that. There’s a number of programs that you can no note taking program you can do a hand drawn image and then export it to Evernote. But I would just love it if it lived in Evernote and I could just write right inside of a note.

Bonni: [00:07:15] The other thing I really like about OneNote and again it’s been years since I used it but was just the ability to have it less like a word processor and more like a note taking app I could just click anywhere on this empty note.

Bonni: [00:07:28] And start typing in text it didn’t have to be in rows or columns or paragraphs style. And so it was just kind of a way of just like we would take notes on a regular piece of paper and Evernote. That’s not the direction they’ve gone.

Bonni: [00:07:40] But we’re going to talk next about all of the wonderful things Evernote can do. Those are just two things I feel like it’s lacking in. But it sure has a lot to offer besides that.

Scott: [00:07:50] You know one other thing that you were talking about you know learning management systems the way we treat them oftentimes is you know even for residential bricks and mortar course the traditional course.

Scott: [00:08:02] We still use them learning management system an almost directional way at least in the learning part is not necessarily a conversational tool. And one of the things about using a different platform like one note or ever know is that the classroom becomes a kind of conversation around learning.

Scott: [00:08:24] You can you can upload some of my linguistics classes you know I’ll find some interesting article or quickly clip that into into our class notebook and put a little title on it that says FYI and what the subject is and my students can go in and read it. They can do the same thing.

Scott: [00:08:42] They can offer stuff that they found on and that are in their e-mail box and saying that to our Evernote notebook and so we begin to kind of have a collaborative learning environment as opposed to a directional learning environment where I created all the materials you just fill out. Whatever I said fill out.

Bonni: [00:08:59] When you do that. How are you setting up the permissions. Because I imagine there could be the risk of if you give me too much permission I can go and start accidentally deleting your notes or editing things that you wish I wouldn’t. How do you set that up?

Scott: [00:09:15] I give the students the address to send notes to the ever. No I set up the permissions where I’m the only ones who can edit the notes. The reason I go that way is you’re absolutely right if somebody asks greatly to leave a note.

Scott: [00:09:26] One of the ways this came to my attention early on was I created a shared notebook. We also I had some some information in there and we were going to run from for our lecture notes and they had access to everything.

Scott: [00:09:38] I was working from and a students started taking his notes on that no messing it up for me and for everyone else. So I set the permissions for the book to be read only. But they have the they have the unique email address that they can send stuff to. And that seems to work.

Bonni: [00:09:58] That’s really smart. And there would be times specifically at our university we’ll have sometimes Disability Services letter will come and one of the accommodations will be a note taker and there could be an opportunity where you would share just a specific note with a student.

Bonni: [00:10:17] Who is perhaps assigned as a note taking role or something. I don’t know that looks different at different universities but we don’t have to share an entire notebook. We could just share a note and maybe share a note with just one specific student.

Bonni: [00:10:28] As an example but this sounds like a really efficient way to create more of a collaborative learning environment without necessarily messing up all the great work that you put into to having those resources there.

Scott: [00:10:40] One the other accommodations. That’s kind of oftentimes offered to students with disabilities is a copy of the teacher’s outlines or presentation material and in this case if you’ve got something set up where you can share that with all of your students.

Scott: [00:10:57] And all of your students benefit from that from that same accommodation I would much rather my students not copy down when I’m putting up on the screen much rather that that they look at that have it in their Evernote or whatever system they’re using.

Scott: [00:11:12] To have that stuff available and then we can actually begin the process of discussing and learning and thinking out loud with one another in the class.

Bonni: [00:11:22] I completely agree and it is it saddens me to think about how in many cases education has conditioned them to just think that’s their job as students is to write down what they see on the screen. I’m continually just stripping stuff off the Powerpoint.

Bonni: [00:11:37] And then like you said giving them the confidence that anything that I show is already available but without having that translate into laziness on their part because I want them to come also ready to be challenge I just said to be in a conversation in the classroom.

Scott: [00:11:52] Yeah.

Bonni: [00:11:53] Well one of the resources I want to point out to people again were at teachinginhighered.com/48 because this is the 48th episode, is your introduction to Evernote in higher ed on your blog. So I’ve got a link there.

Bonni: [00:12:07] And then the other resource that I know both of us have near and dear in our hearts is Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials and this is a PDF book that you can purchase and it is just a phenomenal resource.

Bonni: [00:12:21] I purchased it probably I don’t know a year and a half ago or something like that and I was reviewing for our conversation last night and was up there and still going oh I’d forgotten about that. You could even link it to Twitter and you could do all these things so it’s a really basic way to get started but it goes all the way to the advanced features too.

Scott: [00:12:40] Yeah. Brett Kelly I guess I don’t know him but I understand that he used to work for Evernote and his his his e-book is just so valuable and kind of learning to navigate and and and operate within the system.

Scott: [00:12:57] And you know one of the challenges of something like I know is that there’s no one right way to use it is that can that can be difficult because there are a billion ways you can set things up and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Scott: [00:13:17] You know on first glace and his book is so good at kind of demystifying what’s going on in the platform. And then if you’re right it’s it’s not something you read once it’s something you end up discovering a little nugget that you’re ready for cognitively ready for because you’re in a place where you can use the new nuggets.

Bonni: [00:13:36] Yeah I think cognitively and behaviorally because that’s one of the things as we can get overwhelmed by new features new things without having a solid habit in place for the ones we have discovered.

Bonni: [00:13:48] And that is one of things I know both of us are going to encourage that we’re going to our flow for our talk today is we’re going to talk about some of the big advantages of Evernote.

Bonni: [00:13:56] And again just notebook programs in general. We’re going to give you some advice talk about how we structure things on our end. And then we’ve got at the end when you’re really getting nerdy with Evernote some of the things just to know what’s possible if you’re more on the advanced end.

Bonni: [00:14:12] Or you could save that for when you when you’re ready for it. But what we both recommend we’ve got to start out with just the basics and Evernote really shines here and Evernote works like any notebook that you would have.

Bonni: [00:14:25] In that you’re creating different notebooks with notes inside them and then the can really stretch as you get more advanced the other post I want to mention to take a look at. That will be in the show notes as your Evernote in the classroom post too.

Bonni: [00:14:38] I don’t want to forget to mention that one. Let’s move on and talk a little bit then about some of the big advantages of Evernote. One of the big strengths of Evernote is how easy it is to capture. Could you share a few of the great Evernote features that you like to use for capturing?

Scott: [00:14:55] The one I find myself using the most is the Web clipper. I mean it’s a web page. I think to myself whom I might want to look at this again in the future whether it’s for a class whether it’s for work or maybe it’s just an article I want to read.

Scott: [00:15:10] If I click the Web Clipper that it’s integrated in just about any web browser and it just automatically goes into my inbox and I can I can process it later. The other one I love using his drafts I don’t really like to get him on my iPad.

Scott: [00:15:29] I don’t really like to open up Evernote and navigate get to a new note get started. And if you if you use drafts on IOS you can just start the open start typing capture whatever you needed to capture and then you can sense that that no draft ever know very seamlessly very quickly.

Bonni: [00:15:52] One of the things I use drafts for is if I have an idea for a class I can just type in that idea real quick and then automatically have drafts set up to not just send it to ever notes inbox but you can actually even specify what notebook.

Bonni: [00:16:07] And even what note so I can have a note that either gets appended or pretended with that idea for a particular class and since I’ve taught some of my classes 20 plus times it really does help to have a way to capture new ideas.

Scott: [00:16:22] I haven’t tried pretending and don’t get that something out and go try right after we finished talking.

Bonni: [00:16:28] Yeah it’s really a great feature. The other one is more on the personal level we have two small children and we record an audio message for them each year right around their birthdays which happened to be the beginning of the year too.

Bonni: [00:16:40] And so once when they have their something we want to capture as a memory throughout the year we will just put that in drafts and it will it will prepared that to a note and then we’re going through recording the audio once a year.

Bonni: [00:16:55] We’ll talk through oh you were this you went to your first preschool or whatever you can have the stories right there in front of us. Yeah it’s really fun it’s really fun.

Bonni: [00:17:03] So speaking of emailing into Evernote I sort of dumped the gun there because I was using the app called a drafts. But even if you don’t use the app called drafts you could just open up an email whether you’re on your computer or you’re sitting on your phone.

Bonni: [00:17:16] However you do it. There’s a special email address for your Evernote account that’s unique to you.

Scott: [00:17:23] I think the email link is really valuable. You can quickly email yourself a know which is really awesome. I also use the 4 inch feature on my email and forward an email to my Evernote account.

Scott: [00:17:37] You can assign project tags and everything else in the subject line. If I have an email that I want or that I want to be able to refer to in the future I’m probably going to archive that thing and in searching an email at least an Apple Mail drives me crazy.

Scott: [00:17:55] Searching in Evernote works so seamlessly and quickly that the things I want to get back to end up going to Evernote.

Bonni: [00:18:04] The other easy captures for me. I absolutely love capturing with pictures and Evernote has a really cool document camera that’s built in that. You can it’ll automatically crop off it’ll recognize where the edges of your paper are especially.

Bonni: [00:18:20] If you have some contrast you have a piece of paper on a dark desk for example and it’ll automatically straighten it it’ll automatically fir the pro version I believe it’ll OCR the text I don’t know if it does that and the basic version but on the pro version it does OCR the text and then as an OCR By the way means optical character recognition.

Bonni: [00:18:39] Where the words in that will be searchable. I haven’t used it once. Something as simple as taking a picture of a shampoo bottle I kept forgetting the name of the shampoo that I wanted especially if my husband was out running errands.

Bonni: [00:18:51] Oh you needed thing. Oh yeah I need shampoo but I can’t remember the name of it so I just go into my Evernote and I type in shampoo and up comes a literal picture of my shampoo bottle with of course the name of the brand of shampoo that I buy so it’ll take a photograph of something and the text will be searchable including by the way this just blows my mind.

Bonni: [00:19:13] Hand written text I will say I was a chair of a committee some years ago and we had the recorder who just loved to not show up to me and said I was not interested in both being the chair and also being the recorder and no one else wanted to be the recorder it was one of those things I just.

Bonni: [00:19:29] I just decided hey what’s the important thing here. Capturing what we talked about so I would take notes on a whiteboard. I would take a picture of that white board. It would go into Evernote and at least then it was searchable if I had hand written on the white board the name of the committee meeting and the date that the meeting was held.

Bonni: [00:19:47] It made a really quick easy way to capture and then I didn’t feel I was somehow obligated to take on more than my commitment for that particular committee.

Scott: [00:19:56] You know I’m taking pictures of white board. There’s also a great tool in that classroom. Usually as I’ve written on the board I’ll usually take just a moment telling my students give me just the second them and take a picture.

Scott: [00:20:11] This it’ll be in the Evernote no or on or note for today. So they have access to it. They don’t have to copy down everything that’s on the white board. And then for example my students with disabilities.

Scott: [00:20:24] I’ll oftentimes recommend them especially like in Math class. Don’t try to copy down everything on the white board with your camera out in Evernote take a picture put it in with the rest of your notes and you can go back and see that stuff.

Scott: [00:20:38] And what we’ve discovered is not only searchable but it’s all speed also brings back the context. I don’t mean context in an ever no way I mean cut context and a cognitive way that the student is able to go back and when they see what the professor had written on the whiteboard in math class in the professor’s own writing the schemada is available for them to remember a lot of what was discussed in class when they took the picture ornament.

Bonni: [00:21:07] Talk a little bit about a couple more advantages and then move into our advice. A big advantage. I already sort of alluded to is the search capabilities. I’ve just skimmed the surface though there’s a lot of search possibilities within Evernote.

Bonni: [00:21:19] And then the fact that Evernote is such a popular notebook program that it has integration with a whole bunch of other apps and services. Those are some big key advantages to Evernote over some of the other programs. But let’s move on and start talking about our advice for Evernote.

Bonni: [00:21:38] We already talked about the first one which is to start with the basics and then move on from there. But let’s also talk about how we organize Evernote. For me I started out with too many notebooks. It seemed like gosh you well I should just make a notebook for everything and I should make one for each class.

Bonni: [00:21:55] And I should make one for each project and I wound up with way too many. And for me.

Scott: [00:22:01] Did you do the whole nesting thing where you had nest.

Bonni: [00:22:05] I sure did. Now I got it down to just reference, work, personal there’s an inbox that gets things can just go into and then I can move it to where it needs to go later so that’s four.

Bonni: [00:22:19] And then I’m required to have some for use with my live scribe pen which is a pen that will record lectures and things so they make their own notebooks I don’t have a choice over those but I keep it really minimal.

Bonni: [00:22:32] I think based on what you’re talking about I’m really my mind is being blended in a good way. I might look to maybe having a notebook for a class because then that would be more facilitate better sharing and collaboration as you’ve described.

Bonni: [00:22:45] But I say keep it as minimal as possible and where you would have wanted a notebook create something called a tag and a tag just means I can have more than one tag so something can be related to a class. But it also could be a topic but it also could be something else.

Scott: [00:23:00] Yeah I’m with you. I did the whole notebook thing and the problem is it’s not really a problem. It’s just so much faster and easier to search for notes that using the search tool than it is to navigate through your through your notebooks even if you know which notebook node is in. It’s so much faster to search for it.

Scott: [00:23:20] So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a lot of notebooks. It doesn’t matter. You can have a lot of notebooks in the search tool still will work just fine but I keep one notebook per section of the course that I teach. And that one is shared.

Scott: [00:23:37] And then when the semester is over. I’ll process that notebook a little bit. It has a tag. One of the tags I’m looking at one right now has a tag for the course name.

Scott: [00:23:47] It has a tag phonetics and attack intro to linguistics and the tags phonology because I use that saying though in several different courses or several different ways and so I can pull that out whenever I need to look at this note through one of four different ways that.

Scott: [00:24:04] I think that makes a lot a lot of sense because then when I’m when I’m looking for information I ever know I can either run a text search for or I can just look through my tags and pull out the notes that belong to those tags.

Bonni: [00:24:20] I have some tags that are time based so I would say 2015 S for spring semester 2015 F for our fall semester. And then I have some that are more class that would matter when I was teaching a class but I’m really interested in what you’ve described as far as having a notebook for a class I think that’s going to be something fun to explore.

Bonni: [00:24:41] And speaking of fun things to explore. We have a few ways that when we get the basics down of Evernote we’ve got our organization’s system down we are using tags and we’re capturing things whether it’s a white board or whether it’s a picture or a document.

Bonni: [00:24:57] Like we described what we can take Evernote to the next level with. So this is when you get really really geeky with Evernote and I’d love it if you’d share first about how you’re automating agendas in Evernote.

Scott: [00:25:12] Well yeah. So I created a workflow where using Automator I’ve got my calendar is imported into Evernote every morning at 4:00 in the morning and then it appears to that note.

Scott: [00:25:25] Well so I have my agenda have all of my account all of my meetings that I have for the day. I mean a lot of students throughout the day. So and all of those are scheduled in advance on my calendar so when the when me at 4:00 in the morning.

Scott: [00:25:40] My calendar goes into my Evernote for the day on one no. It also gets a tag. I use a service called TaskClone and what TaskClone will do is it will search through that. No. And if I create any task with a little check box when I think it’ll send the task over to my home focused inbox.

Scott: [00:26:02] I can be meeting with students taking notes while we’re talking. I promise I’ll send you such and such a paper I’ll make little task in that agenda. Note that will automatically go into my Omnifocus inbox and then I can just follow up with the student later on when I’m processing the task.

Bonni: [00:26:23] And this is one of those things where if I had a lot of meetings during the day I can see it being absolutely incredible. But maybe this isn’t quite going to work for me or maybe I’ve never heard of omni focus or or maybe it’s a little bit a little bit too.

Bonni: [00:26:39] Too far along the path for me and my skill level. I’d encourage anyone listening just to be thinking about well if I’m not there yet how could I make meetings just a little bit more effective. And so instead of going all the way with the workflow.

Bonni: [00:26:55] Then maybe I’d just explore this task clone thing that in Evernote. If I just put a checklist or reminder anywhere it would talk to whatever my task manager was I mentioned to you you know I used to use TaskClone with Remember the Milk.

Bonni: [00:27:08] I now have been inspired by you to use it with Omnifocus but it works with a number of different task managers so it might be something you could take away from listening to this episode.

Bonni: [00:27:20] And see how that goes for you and then you have another one that there’s Mac Power Users host named Katie Floyd and she has an article on Evernote and something called Hazel and Hazel is specific to us Mac users. But I think it’s worth us just sharing real quick about Katie Floyd’s workflow would you talk a bit about that.

Scott: [00:27:40] Yes. So one of the things that you can do is this just it takes a just a little bit of work. I don’t know any thing about scripting had borrowed scripts from people on the Internet. So but with just a little bit of instruction and you’ll need it.

Scott: [00:27:58] I sent you the link for for her article on Macworld. If you can just follow through you can automatically have stuff sent to your ever know out of your e-mail box using Hazel or out of a processing box and send to Evernote and we’ll actually process stuff for you. So I capture stuff the old fashioned way of using web clipper’s.

Scott: [00:28:20] Or email. But some of the stuff I capture happens in a more automated way and is available and ready for me when I need to get to it. I think that helps me know that just about everything I need is somewhere within my system and accessible.

Bonni: [00:28:38] The one link that I’ll include in the geeky Evernote users is saving your Kindle highlights into Evernote. I am a big time reader on the Kindle app whether it’s literally on my kindle the Kindle Voyage is the device I’ve recently gotten.

Bonni: [00:28:55] I’m enjoying but I also have the Kindle app on my iPad and I’m reading along I can just be highlighting and then not automatically but but you could transfer the highlights over into Evernote and then as you said to have it all searchable in a little bit more friendly to use.

Scott: [00:29:11] Wow how does that only work with Kindle.Have you tried it with ibooks.

Bonni: [00:29:16] I Have not tried it with books and I don’t use ibooks as much my library is mostly inside of Kindle but I imagine the same thing would work. It’s not like I said it’s not an automated thing but it’s at least to get them over their that’s cool.

Bonni: [00:29:30] All right. You have three recommendations for a share. Share your recommendations to kind of take Evernote to the next level.

Scott: [00:29:37] Well I mentioned one which was passed on and what has cloned is it goes into your Evernote. Well it looks at a seat. Evernote. Note that has the tag cast and it will speak to you to your electronic task manager.

Scott: [00:29:59] At last count I think it’s over 40 different task managers are supported by past clearance so all the way from those B to assign to how many focus they support a lot of different platforms. The thing I like about that service is if it’s in a meeting I said to someone I was going to do something.

Scott: [00:30:23] I can be pretty confident that that’s going to show up in my company focus and I’ll be able to process that task and get it completed sometime in the future.

Bonni: [00:30:33] That is the thing about when we’re using Evernote it’s so easy to forget about something that’s in there. But this is a way where hey I’m looking at my task manager every day multiple times a day to make sure that it reminds us to check back with things that we’ve captured and Evernote it’s really really handy thing.

Scott: [00:30:53] Yeah. And there are some nerds who use Evernote as their task manager as well. And there are ways to set it up with reminders and everything else. I don’t want to have multiple reminders and multiplied. I like to have one task inbox and so code is useful.

Scott: [00:31:09] But there is a way to use Evernote to manage you can do it. Getting Things Done. A GTD approach in Evernote itself.

Bonni: [00:31:20] Yeah.

Bonni: [00:31:21] I wouldn’t recommend it but like you said it’s just a personal preference thing. Absolutely. It’s possible it’s possible and maybe for someone listening it’s just the right tool for them. I absolutely love Omnifocus. It’s my go to. Tell us about your next once Chungwasoft.

Scott: [00:31:44] I found them because I needed a send later service in Apple Mail. But they also have an Evernote Clipper.

Scott: [00:31:53] And the cool thing about Chungwasoft, Evernote Clipper is that in your email if you’re using Apple Mail you’ll end up with a little button up on the top and when you’re highlighting an email you can just click the button and it will allow you to put that email into Evernote.

Scott: [00:32:12] The really cool thing is you don’t have any forwarding formatting or anything. It just seems to be the No. Just as the email just as it is going to Evernote and I found that I use it. Quite frequently several times a day.

Scott: [00:32:29] I still will forward stuff if I’m looking at my email on my iPhone but if I’m sitting at my computer and I want to forward an email and have ended up using that that ever mail quite often.

Bonni: [00:32:43] Oh that sounds great. And then I have shared about Scannable before on the show but this may be someone’s first time listening or I’m sure you have a unique way of using Scannable tell us about what it is. Just remind us and then how you use it.

Scott: [00:32:58] Well it was because a lot of the weather for my own home use or for work and I discovered I scan everything. I scanned every receipt with Scannable. The Scannable is I think it was created by the Evernote folks. Do you know if I’m correct on that?

Bonni: [00:33:23] It is. Yeah I was created by Evernote.

Scott: [00:33:24] Yeah and the thing that’s cool about the app is it searches for the edges of document it will be skew a document and it works extremely fast and will send your stuff directly to your inbox very very quickly very seamlessly and the OCR technology the optical character recognition is sufficient to where I’ve not found an app yet on my iPhone that syncs so well familiar ever no that is as accurate as Scannable is still use my scansnap desktop scanner if I have stuff in the office.

Scott: [00:34:09] But if I’m out and about or at a conference that I need to scan the receipt I’m almost always going to go ahead and capture it with Scannable instead of trying to keep track of that paper until I get home.

Bonni: [00:34:21] It is so fast and so quick and I almost had my scanner gets used a lot less even when I’m in my office now and I’m going to give a quick used case for me. I like when I’m listening to students final presentations.

Bonni: [00:34:35] I don’t want to be on my technology because I want to model for them when they’re in my class. Most of the time we leave the technology alone. I do flipped classes there’s plenty of times where they get to use the technology that we come in person we like to be very present for each other.

Bonni: [00:34:50] And I don’t want to sit there on my iPad as I watch their presentations because then it looks like well all that stuff I told you before well I don’t live so I’ll bring the rubric for their presentations and I’ll fill the rubric out as they’re presenting.

Bonni: [00:35:03] That way I can give full eye contact they can see that I’m writing on the rubric. Is they don’t wonder. Am I sitting there doing something else. Actually when I was getting my doctorate I had someone Professor read the newspaper in the back of the room when we were giving presentations.

Bonni: [00:35:20] And that was one of those. It still boggles the mind how that would be okay. I want to go for cool tensions with the students and then what I did with the actually the Scannable technology now as they’ve just upgraded ever no recently to be built into Evernote so the camera right inside of the Evernote app.

Bonni: [00:35:41] Will get rid of the edges of the page just as you described it it’ll it’ll make sure that it’s straight it’ll do the OCR all of that I just scanned so quick. Every single one of those rubrics into separate notes and then I went in on each one of the notes as I’m still physically holding the rubric in my hand.

Bonni: [00:36:02] I would record an audio note. I don’t have the best penmanship so I would tell them you know I’m going to talk you through the rubric congratulate you on the presentation and give you the feedback so they don’t have to worry about reading my writing but they’re able to hear my voice and see the rubric and it was fast and then I just shared the note to the students.

Scott: [00:36:20] That’s a great idea.

Bonni: [00:36:23] It worked really good as far as my recommendation for today. I am going to recommend a book called The Checklist Manifesto. One of the other great things to have inside of Evernote our checklists.

Bonni: [00:36:36] I’m just quickly looking on my shortcuts. I have a checklist for let’s have a checklist I’m sorry have a list of potential podcast guests I have checklists for things like class preparation when I’m developing a new class or when I’m teaching a class that I’ve taught before.

Bonni: [00:36:53] All the things that have to happen are all the things that have to happen at the beginning of a semester. I have a checklist for that and I got inspired after reading The Checklist Manifesto. It is an absolutely wonderful read because it’s just it talks about all these different aspects of how checklists are saving lives and hospitals how checklists are making our air flights safer.

Bonni: [00:37:14] Because pilots use checklists and how architects that are building buildings that have never existed before and therefore there’s no checklist to speak of but just a communication checklist.

Bonni: [00:37:25] That has everybody communicating with each other at different key milestones in building these incredible buildings that have never existed before. So the checklist manifesto is my recommendation. And then you could think about putting some of your checklists into Evernote.

Scott: [00:37:41] A great idea. You know the thing of it is for those of us who teach it nobody’s going to fall out of our airplane because we didn’t have a checklist. But the work we do is really important and it’s worthy of that kind of attention and time and focus to try to do it well don’t you think.

Bonni: [00:38:03] Oh absolutely. I do. And I’ll tell you that reduces my stress too in fact you saw my checklist for every episode that I have at the beginning so I don’t forget to test the sound levels or depressed record all that good stuff to make a podcast happens. It’s the little things sometimes.

Bonni: [00:38:18] Well Scott I want to thank you so much for coming on to Teaching In Higher Ed. I feel like we could have had this as five episodes because you are a wealth of information. I hope you’ll consider coming back on the show in the future and sharing even more.

Scott: [00:38:32] I really did enjoy it. Thank you.

Bonni: [00:38:35] I have so many things to go and explore in Evernote. Thanks once again to Scott Self for being here on Teaching In Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:38:46] And this is my last reminder we have episode 50. Coming up and I would love it if you would celebrate with us by calling 949-38LEARN.

Bonni: [00:38:58] And leaving a message with a takeaway that you’ve had from listening to teaching in higher ed as well as a recommendation for the community. Again that’s 949-38learn. It will only take a second you can just take a break from grading.

Bonni: [00:39:12] Walk around your block for a bit. Leave a voicemail. 949-38learn and help us celebrate. Maybe you could blow one of those party whistles or something to. Celebrate. A good almost year in Teaching In Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:39:27] Thanks for listening. And as always send your feedback on teachinginhighered.com/feedback. And thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.