Evernote

     The thing I like most about Evernote is that it is my omnipresent super organizer. All my notes, web links, bits of thoughts, etc. goes there. When I get home, I can access everything.  In fact, I can access everything wherever I go, such as at a friends' house across the street, or across the world. I may forget about what I put in Evernote after a while, but Evernote remembers.  It is so much better than relying on pieces of paper that I might lose or get eaten by a dog. When I am listening to a lecture, audio recording can be a lifesaver, as that is how I learn best. I also like that I can search from all my notes, and that I don’t have to look at or try to decipher my messy writing.

      I found that Evernote handles audio recording poorly. Several times I couldn't save the audio to file after the recording ended. I pressed the save button yet nothing was saved at all.  That was disappointing as I would really liked to have used the audio notes. Audio notes are important to me not only because they save me time on typing but also I learn very well through audio.  I also have found that the sound quality of Evernote recordings more muffled sounding than those made by, for instance, QuickVoice, on iOS. The Evernote iPad app had crashed several times when trying to open large PDF image files. I also vehemently disliked the fact that there is no "undo" button in Evernote iPad.

      I think Evernote could help us better form Evernote study groups. Maybe this is already a feature, but my friends and I shared a notebook once but that was all. We could have been asking each other questions  in the shared notebook , right within Evernote. I have heard about Piazza and it seems to help asking questions, even anonymously. There are so many tools nowadays. I wish there were a tool to cover all my needs from note-taking, question asking, discussion to blogging. I also think that a time-line overview of all my notes would help a lot!  For instance, I would like to see how active I have been tracking a subject over time.