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Issue #46 | September 19, 2009
| office: 817.210.6177
Back to School: Evernote | Flash Cards | Mind Mapping
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Binders, rulers and textbooks; it seems that school starts earlier every year. While there isn't much that can be done about the scheduling havoc that back-to-school brings, the technological tools available this year should make studying a bit easier. This year brings us Evernote-an all purpose digital stuff organizer, FlashCardMachine-an easy to use online stash for study flash cards and MindMeister-an online mind mapping tool.
Evernote, Remember Everything. [evernote.com]
Some people are really good at making and organizing notes of everything, some people simply are not. I am a proud member of the latter category. Evernote gives the organizationally challenged a place to collect and organize digital stuff. What kind of stuff? Pretty much everything. Photos from your cell phone, web pages, emails, Tweets, and even audio files file neatly into Evernote's notebooks. Photos and images are even processed and the text contained within is transformed into usable text that can be pasted into other applications. It even makes organization simple by creating keywords automatically and allowing you to add tags that you can later use to search for. Getting notes into Evernote is just as easy. There is a desktop application for both Windows and Mac. Apps for iPhone, Blackberry, WebOS, and Windows Mobile cover just about any smart phone you can find. You can even send notes in via email or SMS. If all else fails, you can log into the website and add notes directly. The free accounts only allow for 40MB monthly which is more than enough for the average user. Power users may want to consider the Pro account which gets you a 500MB monthly allowance for either $5/month or $45/year.
Flash Card Machine, Create, Study and Share Online Flash Cards [flashcardmachine.com]
The Flash Card Machine is a fairly straight forward way to create, study and share study type flash cards online. Its simplicity makes it appropriate for anyone from kindergarten students to advanced professionals. Teachers can use the free service to create sets of flash cards that can then be used by students from their home computers or in a school lab. Students and professionals can use the service to create their own tailored set of cards to help pass that semester exam or certification test. You can also make your card sets public so others may benefit from your hard work while in turn you can also study from other sets made public by other people. Currently the site boasts 14 million public cards in over 80,000 different sets. The site is a free service that survives on donations.
Mind Meister, Real-Time Brainstorming [mindmeister.com]
If you're not familiar with mind mapping, you're not alone. The name seems to describe some sort of futuristic helmet that would render out a Google map of your brain waves. In reality it is far more simple than that. In fact, the idea has probably been around ever since pencil first met paper. You start with a single idea in a little box, the central hub of your map. Lines spider out from this central point to other little boxes filled with sub-ideas. Lines from there break up those ideas even further and the process continues until that term paper or sales presentation has pretty much written itself. It is a bit hard to describe but the results are instantly apparent upon seeing an example. There is a nice example detailing fish and aquariums located here. The free accounts include up to three concurrent maps which would be enough for the occasional user but if the idea really works well for you a pro account will only run you $4/month or $49/year. Maps can be exported to PDF files or printed from the free account allowing you to delete older maps to stay under your 3 map limit.
Final Byte...
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
~Al Gore
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