When I was in high school, I was the student who took notes in multicolor inks and doodled in the margins. These days, I’m still a note taker and I love making lists. But taking notes on Post-its (despite my love of all things paper) is not really practical. Notebooks aren’t either and I have a lot of those. This brings me to another one of my favorite online tools  – Evernote.

I first heard of Evernote a couple of years ago when Peter and I attended a Digital Life conference. At the time, I was using Microsoft’s OneNote for lesson plans and notes and wasn’t really looking for anything new. If I am remembering correctly, it was just software at the time and didn’t have an online option (I tried looking this up but they don’t appear to have their history listed on their site.)

Flash forward to now and Evernote has software for your computer (PC or Mac), your phone, and an online version. You can learn more about some of the details behind Evernote here. I mainly use the online and phone versions of Evernote, however I recently installed the software on my work computer as well for a reason I’ll explain in a bit.

I use the online version every day. I keep my lesson plans in it so I’m constantly updating it throughout the day. I have organized mine into several notebooks in an attempt to keep myself organized. Here’s a look at my notebooks:

Remember those lists I mentioned earlier? I’ve starting keeping my lists and notes in Evernote as well. Every week I make my grocery list in the online version of Evernote and then access it from my phone using the mobile version. It is so much more convenient to scroll through the list on my phone instead of digging through my purse for whatever scrap piece of paper I jotted it down on. I usually add our weekly menus to the list as well as because its then available on my phone AND online so I’m ready to tell my hubby what’s for dinner when he asks, and usually this happens right after lunch each day – I guess because he is thinking about food?

Evernote also has a Web Clipper feature which allows you to highlight anything you are interested in saving online – pictures, text, links, etc… –and save it directly into your Evernote. If you install the software, the Web Clipper feature comes with it, otherwise you can install a plug-in into the Firefox browser. This is why I decided to install the software at work. Doing so also installed the clipper option into Outlook so I can right click on email messages and add them to my Evernote software which then links to the online version. I’ve been using this lately with daily emails I receive from educational news websites because I don’t often have time to read them at work.

Finally, there’s another feature of Evernote that I just learned about tonight – Evernote + Twitter. Start following “myen” and soon you will receive a DM (Direct Message) from myen with a link to click which will link your Twitter account to your Evernote account. You can then DM myen with notes to post in your account privately (without showing up on your Twitter) or you can add @myEN to the body of any of your public tweets and then your message will be posted on Twitter and sent to your Evernote account. I just tried it and received the link to set things up in under four minutes.

I do still keep handwritten notes and I still love to make my lists. I also still use OneNote, but Microsoft hasn’t offered a web version, and that’s my favorite part of Evernote. Its an information organizing solution that I’m glad I have incorporated into my every day life.