Exploring Evernote

Hello readers!

After a long week of midterms, meetings and assignments, it is finally reading week! I am looking forward to spending time with family and plan to make the most of my time off by getting ahead on projects and readings for the remainder of the semester. Catching up on sleep is also on my list of things to do!

This week in ADED 1P32, we explored Evernote, which is essentially a cloud-based digital workspace. Being unfamiliar with this tool, I found this Introduction to Evernote SlideShare presentation helpful as it oriented me with the core features and functions. We are currently researching Digital Literacy for a collaborative group project in this class. I found that Evernote is a great way to collect and bookmark information that we may need in assembling our final presentation.

Brown, M. (CC) 2016

My favourite feature in Evernote is the tagging option. I like to keep everything in life, especially school work and notes, as organized as possible. I have gotten into the old-fashioned habit of organizing my notes using a binder and having dividers for each subject. Imagine doing this every year from grade 9 to 3rd year of university... Needless to say, I have a large collection of binders that I am running out of storage space for (and just cannot get rid of because I feel like there may be something that I can use later on!). The tags on Evernote are like a table-of-contents that guide you to the dividers in a binder. In the notebook that I created for Digital Literacy, I tagged each note or clipping with what type of material it was and included digital literacy, so that if I happen to create subsequent notebooks, I can easily search "Digital Literacy" to find all of the information categorized about that topic in a table-of-contents type format.

Evernote is a tool that I will add to the "Aggregate" section of my PLE diagram because it is a great way to collect information and have access to it all in one place. Being at the half-way point in this course, I have had the opportunity to enhance my digital literacy skills through exploring various online tools and reflecting upon them each week. Although some tools have been more useful than others, the new tools that I have added to my PLE have made a positive contribution to my education (i.e. being better able to collaborate with others online, keeping documents more centralized and organized, enhancing my networking skills, etc).

This Week's Feedly Reader Article

Seeing that the focus of our course last week was Twitter, I found the article called Your hospital can and should harness the power of Twitter particularly interesting. I agree with the article in terms of using Twitter to connect with and obtain feedback from patients. Being heavily involved in hospital quality improvement projects, I think that using technology is an efficient and cost-effective way to engage patients and have them provide their feedback to guide patient-centered quality improvement interventions. Oftentimes, it is a challenge to obtain the feedback needed to guide QI projects. Our project is still in its early phases, and it will be interesting to see whether or not technology is a preferred method of collecting feedback in the Niagara Region, due to the aging population and whether or not this demographic has access to technology.