Evernote is one of those handy applications that I discovered while I was working on my dissertation, and then found so many other uses for over the years. At its core, Evernote is a note taking application, but your notes live out in the cloud so you can access them from anywhere, which means you can access your notes from a Mac or a PC, from your iOS or Android device, or through your web browser. These notes can be everything from a page of text and images that you create within Evernote, to screenshots of websites that are clipped from your browser. They can be simple notes and reminders that are created on the fly, or long documents that include all sorts of attachments. It can even perform optical character recognition on handwritten notes that you snap a picture of and upload into Evernote. I have used this program to help keep track of everything from grocery lists and scanned receipts, to managing course redesign files and grant applications.
The application makes it easy to create notebooks to store collections of these notes, and to create whatever tags you might find especially useful. For example, I have created notebooks for each of my courses and stuff them full of information that I have put together for in-class discussions, course assignments, and so on. But I have also created tags for each of the different types of assignments--e.g., presentations--that I can use to review the assignments across my different classes. I have found this especially helpful whenever I am working on revising elements of a course, or even a full, course because it lets me hang on to the old material and collect ideas for new elements all in one place.
Submitted by Adam Van Liere, Political Science/Public Administration
