Thing 6: Organizing and Saving Content Online

Now that you're on Thing 6, you've made it past the halfway point in the program!

Evernote

One of the biggest challenges posed by shifting more and more of our daily lives into online spaces is organizing and saving it all. My #1 most-used online web tool is Evernote. Evernote acts as a heavy-duty online organizational systems of notebooks, notes, and tags. Anything you find on the web is able to be saved as an Evernote note, and can be filed into any of your Evernote notebooks. Each note can also have multiple "tags", or labels, allowing you to search for individual notes by tags. You can also create new notes, which are useful for making "to-do" lists, taking notes, creating meeting agendas, etc. Evernote is available as an iPhone/iPad/Android app, on the web, and as a desktop software application, allowing you to access any of your notes no matter where you are in the world. Evernote has a Chrome App as well as a Chrome Extension. The extension sits up in your browser-- you simply click on the little elephant icon whenever you want to save something on the web to your Evernote. Finally, you can even share your notebooks with other people, making it a social tool as well as a tool for personal productivity.

Here is an Evernote overview screencast I created to give you a look into my Evernote universe:

Pocket

Another, simpler tool for organizing content on the web is Pocket. Pocket is a way to easily save websites, images and video to your online account for reading and viewing at your convenience. How many times have you thought, "I'll come back and look at that video/picture/article later", only to have it disappear into the ether? Pocket is best for saving web content that you don't necessarily want to keep forever, but that you want to look at at a later date. I use Evernote for content I want to save long-term, and Pocket for content I just want to look at again. Pocket is also available as an iPhone/iPad/Android app as well as on the web, and has a Chrome App and Chrome Extension, making saving and accessing your content easy.

Here is a good Pocket tutorial and overview I found online:

To Complete Thing 6:

• Create an Evernote account.
• Set up some notebooks and start adding notes (websites, new notes, pictures, etc.) with tags.
• Optional (especially if you've been using Evernote for a while): try sharing Notebooks and Notes.
• Create a Pocket account.
• Add some content (websites, images, video, etc.) with tags.
• In your "Thing 6: Organizing and Saving Content Online" post, reflect on your experiences with Evernote and Pocket. What did you think of these tools Would you use one, both, or neither? Have you used them before? How do you normally organize and save online content?
  
  ***If you have used either/both of these tools before, you could instead make a screencast tutorial teaching others how to use them. You could then embed this into your Thing 6 blog post. We can add this to our tech integration websites for others to use!