.@Evernote and @LivescribeK12 on the #EduTour

This is the first of a few posts I will be writing about using various tools to support the EduTour.

I wanted to briefly talk about the awesomeness that is Livescribe and Evernote. I have been using the Livescribe Sky Pen for a while and I have always loved it. It can record the notes and audio and directly save it to a specific Evernote notebook. This isn't new. However, using it on this trip makes the most sense. This is something that I would recommend to all journalists and journalism classes. I will be passing this to my journalism teachers this Fall.

One of the things I am doing on this trip is interviewing people about education. I want to know what they think about the current state of education and what they thought about their education growing up. Traditionally, I would just listen and take notes on my iPad or in a notebook. My main problem is that my handwriting is not very clean and I have a hard time listening and writing down information at the same time. Note-taking has always been a nightmare for me. Livescribe and Evernote solve that problem.

I now get to keep the audio of the conversation and I do not have to worry about the handwriting or getting every word down for the interview. What I have actually done is write the questions done in advance and just create dots for each person I'm interviewing. When I go to the next questions, I create a new dot. I have all of the information right there in the book for review after the trip or while Tim is driving. By listening to the interview, I can make any other notes I want for the things that really stand out to me.

The back up to Evernote is also great. If something should happen to the notebook on the trip, everything I have is saved in Evernote. I will not lose a single interview or note. That is what is so great about the cloud based storage of Evernote and Livescribe. I really think more teachers should look into taking their class notes using Livescribe so students can do the same thing. The notes will always be there not matter what happens and that is huge for students who tend to lose things. These two guys just made the #EduTour so much easier.