Evernote for education? Ask the elephants

I’ve had Evernote on the back burner for a while now, wanting to get round to investigating its potential. Evernote presents itself as an ‘external brain’, remembering things so you don’t have to (using the elephants in the clouds). It’s client driven, so there’s a download involved, but there are a host of downloads for different operating systems and mobile devices. The client then synchronizes with your Evernote account (free or monthly subscription depending on how much you want to use it).

The current promo video is:

And I found this original video useful to explain Evernote’s uses.

I have to admit that I’m not a fan of sync’ing. I prefer to use online services that access the content directly on the server without having to use a dedicated client, with one or two exceptions. Consequently, I’m not sure I’ll be using Evernote as much as I anticipated. However, that might not reflect other people’s working practises, so I thought it useful to present some of what I would find Evernote useful for.

I think the main use for me is the way Evernote can allow you to search text in images. This has particular use for education if you take a photo or a screen shot of some relevant text, or hand written notes, possibly from a whiteboard, then suddenly you have a searchable object.

I gave it a try with possibly a difficult test of this image and did a search for “franc” (part of fancisco). The result was pretty good but not perfect.

Evernote also allows you to collaborate by sharing your ‘notebooks’

Further videos about Evernote and how to use it are available on their YouTube channel or the video page of their website.

Internet Safety

It is important for parents, carers and teachers to ensure that children are safe when using the Internet. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) is part of the authorities in Britain dedicated to child protect. Part of their work is about disseminating the message of Internet safety. I just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight their work and to draw out some significant areas of their website.

A new intelligence report (pdf) has been published that parents will find useful in protecting their children whilst online, and an accompanying video:

Linked in with the CEOP site is the Think u know site.

This has advice split into age specific sections of 5-7, 8-10, 11-16, along with Parent or Carer and Teacher or Trainer.

The 5-7 year olds section, for example, has a set of non-threatening, age appropriate cartoons about using computers safely on the Internet.

The Parent or Carer section has some simple and informative advice about  how children use technology; important uses and concerns. The different areas covered in the faq section include grooming, mobiles, gaming, social networking and chat. There’s a quiz for parents to take to test their knowledge of how children use technology and the Internet. And what about this video as a warning:

Their YouTube video channel is linked here.

Additional (30/10/09): This video is used by police in schools to highlight the issues to school children. It’s very powerful, and the user feedback about it is very encouraging.

Experiment and discussion

I’ve recently written a couple of blog post that are receive a bit of attention, the first was about the changing role of education and the second about Nurphy a new online service for conversations. I’ve decided to see if I can combine then by asking question about one on the other and seeing what happens. It’s a bit of an experiment really.

So, here goes. I’ve posted the following up as a conversation that anyone can join, once registered with Nurphy. Will people be willing to sign up for an untested service at this early stage? I’ll find out. The conversation starts here.

Whatever, I’d still like people’s opinions about the following.

Is the rise of the Professional Amateur Pro-Am, the increase in open educational resources (OER), personal learning environments (PLE), and greater significance of informal learning and research going to lead to a move away from an emphasis on institutional, formal learning?

As people are able to continually express their skills, abilities and achievements via social media, will formalized accreditation, with potentially out-dated assessment systems, be less relevant?

Or are formal learning and research institutions able to adapt quickly enough to the new requirements of society?

Kids and comics – online

Yesterday I stumbled across a video that really got me interested in something – making comics online. I know it sounds daft, but when kids are using words like artistic, creative, amazing, sensational, awesome and cool, it gets me thinking there’s something in this.

Here’s the video:

and a link to a post ‘wot I wrote’.

Take a Tablet – but which?

There are rumours about late prototypes of new tablets from both Microsoft and Apple. The Microsoft Courier is more of a booklet with two 7 inch multitouch screens, hinged in the middle. There’s a camera on the back of one. And here’s the video of the interface:

Gizmodo broke the story and everyone else was playing catchup.

No one actually seems to know about the Apple tablet; it seems to be speculation relating to the volume of printer material potentially becoming available via iTunes, and the success of the Kindle.

Nurphy – it’s about conversations

Something called Nurphy has just come out, and it’s an interesting concept that I can see potentially gaining a position for itself. The easiest way to describe it is a cross between email and microblogging (Twitter) and a forum. Effectively you can have a public conversation that can be carried out using a Nurphy account or via email. This conversation, if you’ve set it to public, has a unique URL and can therefore be viewed from anywhere. And if you’ve allowed it, anyone can contribute to the conversation. This would seem to fulfill a conversation need that falls between Twitter and via email. I’ll investigate it for a while.

Here is a conversation I set up to create some screen shots to demonstrate the process.

1. Click the Start a Conversation button

As I hadn’t got any contacts set up at this stage, I typed in an email address and then my comment. You aren’t limited to 140 characters, but equally with this service I don’t think you want to go too big with what you’re writing; it is supposed to be a conversation after all.

2. Your list of Conversations now has that particular one there.

It has been allocated a unique code that with make up its unique URL which can now be publicized.

3. The email address I included in the conversation now receives an email

which upon opening look like:

So for someone who isn’t on Nurphy they are able to participate via email. they receive your comments and can respond by replying to the email and typing beteen the lines delimited by [===>  <===].

In this example:

4. From my Nurphy account I can now see the emailed response appear in the conversation:

And I can respond to continue the conversation.

At any time you can use the tabs to see who the participant in a conversation are:

And you have the option of closing off a public conversation to make it exclusive (or private), via the Options tab:

In addition, you can embed some code that provides a button in your site to allow people to start a conversation with you via Nurphy.

If you want to see more of what the potential of Nurphy is, then take a look at the video:

Oh, and there’s an iPhone / iPod Touch interface available.