There are a lot of posts about using web tools in education. Dave Sherman & Frank Buck wrote about really useful tools at their respective sites. I want to approach it from a little different angle – using these new tools to simplify your life across operating systems, including your phone: Jott, Foxmarks, Evernote & Dropbox. These four tools do different things, but they have a common approach – they all seek to synchronize your information over multiple machines. Here’s what they do.
Jott – This is the one I use almost daily. Jott is a to-do list solution, but so much more. When you register for a free Jott account you associate your cell phone with it. Then you can call Jott & speak for up to 30 seconds. The Jott service transcribes your voice into text & sends it to your account. Your account can exist anywhere – there are Jott clients for both Mac & PC, as well as a web interface. Of course you can just type into Jott too, and wherever you launch Jott you get your information. I use it on two Macs, one PC, & my phone. I use it all the time in the car.
Foxmarks – I use Foxmarks all the time, but I don’t know it! It’s one of those “set it & forget it” applications. Foxmarks is a plugin for Firefox that syncs your bookmarks from various computers. If you have a laptop & a desktop & you want the same bookmarks on both machines Foxmarks is for you. Again, it is platform independent.
Evernote – I don’t have a great memory for names. Evenote helps people like me remember things. You can clip any digital content using the Evernote interface – just like scrapbooking – and save it in Evernote. Evernote runs on PC, Mac, & an increasing number of cell phones. And again, since you have one Evernote account you can get the same information from all the devices you use. It also has a very powerful search function.
Dropbox – This is one of the newest tools I use, and it’s really quite cool. Dropbox work similarily to all the above mentioned tools – you can use it on multiple machines & connect to it anywhere you can get online, but you can store ANYTHING! It creates a sort of tunnel between your computers & syncs files, pictures, music, text, anything across all of your different log in points.
What are your new, favorite tools?
(PS – I got this in just in time to qualify as a Tech Tip Tuesday post!)
I love drop.io for free hosting of files. You can alter settings to make it collaborative or private, and it makes things like documents and media available online. My page is http://drop.io/peltmusic and I actually had a student download a scale sheet and practice over the summer! Best of all it’s free.
Wow Doug, that is very cool. Thanks.