Evernote

The Evernote tagline is "Remember Everything" and it really does help to deliver on that promise.  Evernote is a combination note-taking and storing application with some great features to help categorize your notes using either notebooks and / or tags that are then easily searched.  You can quickly and easily add images, web pages, emails, and whatever you can think of in addition to basic text editing functionality.  Evernote will even scan through the images and other documents (if you want) so that everything is searchable.  As a bonus, Evernote is available on most platforms (including the Mac, web, and iPhone which are the ones that I use) and synchronizes between them all.  You can also share your Evernote libraries selectively with other folks who need to see or edit them.

I use Evernote for almost everything at this point.  On the work front, I'm using it to keep track of design decisions and brainstorming (including images of the whiteboards), take notes in meetings, track my to-do lists for everything, and keep a list of readings and technologies to follow up with (to name a few).  On the personal side of things, I keep track of other to-do lists, travel information, recipes, and my grocery list.

Evernote is also Free, though there are some bonuses for those willing to get the premium account, and I find it is well worth it.

Evernote is also extensible, and a number of 3rd party developers have put together some pretty neat solutions.  My favorite at the moment is EgretList for the iPhone.  EgretList is a to-do list manager that pulls in anything that has a checkbox from your Evernote library into a set of easily organized to-do lists that can be grouped by urgency, location, project, or whatever you can think of. 

Using BeeSign 1.3

This page is intended to provide some of the basic information that you will need to use BeeSign. Most of the feaures are then relatively easy to discover by exploring the interface. However, if you would like additional instructions about the more advanced features, or information regarding how I implemented BeeSign please contact me directly.

You may also want to try BeeSign 1.3 or read more about the BeeSign Project.
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Tags, Hashtags, Keywords, and Categories

If you click around my site you will notice that many of the articles, presentations, and projects are “tagged”. These tags are also listed on the right side of the site to help people navigate quickly to all of the entries that relate to a particular topic. Tags are common in blogs, wikis, and other websites. Hashtags play a similar role on Twitter (e.g., I use #p544 to identify tweets related to p544, a class that I teach). These tags all serve a similar role to the keywords that are often presented in an academic journal or conference submission website–they help to quickly and easily identify the broad categories that a work relates to.
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Twitter (and blogs, and facebook, and …)

At the simplest level, Twitter is a tool that let’s you publish short notes (140 characters maximum) that can include images and pictures. People who choose to “follow” your twitter feed can read your “tweets” whenever you post them, and you can of course follow other people’s twitter feeds. For the rest of the details, I suggest you check out their web-page.

There are many other tools that also let you post information and / or follow the information that your friends and colleagues are posting, including blogs and facebook.  I currently use all 3 (you can see the twitter feed I use to discuss my courses: here ). Furthermore, the importance of all of these social networking tools are discussed widely by many knowledgeable people, so I won’t reproduce that here. I will however offer three suggestions that I believe bear repeating:
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QuickTime (Pro)

Most people who use video for analysis think of QuickTime only as an option for playing back their video.  However, QuickTime also has a host of built in features that can be quite helpful and avoid the need to use a high-end video editing tool, particularly if you have QuickTime Pro.  I still use other tools, but for quick edits and the like, it is far easier to take care of them right inside of QuickTime.  Specifically, QuickTime let’s you trim a movie or combine movies (sequentially or on different layers), export the entire movie or just the audio track, save the movie or audio in a number of different formats, watch only a selected section (this is particularly useful when you are reviewing a small section in the middle of the video), jump directly to a specific point, add bookmarks, and more.  If you want to edit subtitles by hand, that is also an option, though I find Inqscribe to be much easier for that.
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On choosing an interactive whiteboard

I am currently in the process of selecting an interactive whiteboard for an upcoming research project. In my last few projects I have used both of the major interactive whiteboard brands (Smart and Mimio), each with a number of different configurations. There are several issues that may influence one’s purchasing decision such as cost, space or existing room configurations, projector availability, etc.  However, I have realized that my criteria for an interactive whiteboard are, out of necessity, quite different from those of a typical classroom teacher, so I figured I would mention some of them.

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