Family Tech: Tools for Young Scholars

Hi. Welcome to Family Tech. We are going to be talking about ways to make the technology we use in the home, whether for fun, communications, education or for the work we do from home, work better.

Sending the young scholars in our home back-to-school this year made me think about enabling them with the right technology.

Each has a Wi-Fi enabled laptop. They are easily carried to classes and the library, and take up less room for dorm residents.

We have a small portable scanner from the Neat Company. It is powered from the USB drive so taking one with you is easy. Fujitsu also makes their Scansnap and there are are others like these.

They don’t need an iPhone to have a good smartphone. We found the Samsung Instinct hooked to the Sprint Network to be affordable and good enough. Most carriers now have affordable smartphones. These are important not only for communications, but they give the students a multitude of other tools: alarm clock, stop watch, basic calculator, camera etc.

And a printer is still necessary; not all teachers are willing to take electronic submissions.

It’s the free software that really enables them. The first is Evernote, which — the Web site says — “allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.” There are clients for Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Web and the mobile Web.

My scholars use Dropbox to store files online, and synchronize files among various computers. Dropbox also lets them share folders with other Dropbox users.

There are clients available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

They have accounts for Google’s own calendaring and e-mail.

Google Docs or OpenOffice provide good alternatives to Office. Both work just fine for the college student, and are free. If you want MS Office, look at their Student Edition. It is much cheaper.

We’ll talk about these tools in more detail in future columns.

Here’s how a typical day for a technology-enabled student might go.

Let’s say Derek is a college student living in a dorm. Derek has already had one computer break on him during the school year, and another was stolen. Redundancy of data and off computer backup are now critical to him. As he sits in his first class, he types his notes directly into Evernote.

Every 60 minutes, Evernote synchronizes itself with their on line database. Evernote keeps multiple copies of every note at its data center, augmenting the copy on Derek’s computer.

He takes a quick snapshot of the white board with his cell phone’s camera as he leaves class. Every Evernote account has its own e-mail address. He e-mails the photo to Evernote. Evernote indexes the words it finds in the photo, allowing Derek to search for them later.

His professor for the next class has outlawed laptop use in class, fearful that students are surfing the net instead of paying attention to his lecture. Derek takes notes the old fashioned way, on paper. When he gets back to his room, he will scan the notes with his small scanner into Evernote. Evernote will digest the PDF file and make the text searchable. Derek can also scan any worksheets in to Evernote too.

The professor announces a guest lecturer coming to campus. Derek text messages his Google Calendar account with the event. He has Google Calendar set to send him text messages to remind him of events. Derek remembers the days before the family cell account had unlimited text messaging. He is glad those days are over; Dad is easier to deal with now. Besides communications with friends, he finds he uses text messages to add items to various on line programs like Google Calendar and Evernote, and have applications text him reminders.

Derek also takes a minute to text Evernote a reminder for himself to study for the upcoming test in this class. Derek uses Evernote to keep track of the tasks he needs to get done. He uses Google Calendar for events with specific dates. At the start of the semester he transferred all key dates from his syllabus for each class to Google Calendar. That way, he can see test dates and project due dates so they do not sneak up on him. He even went so far as to put in dates a week or more in advance to remind himself to start projects.

In the library he researches for a team project. He moves the material for that project into its own Shared Evernote Notebook. His team can see the notes on the Web automatically. He can also share files using Dropbox.

For online research he can record bookmarks and clip items from the Web into Evernote so it is stored right along with the other research he has. Evernote has bookmarklets allowing various browsers to capture information into Evernote.

Later in his room, the takes advantage of his roommate being out to get some reading done from a textbook. As he reads, he stops at the end of each section and types up some notes about what he has read. That act alone sets the material into his brain, he has found, but having it in Evernote makes it easy to find when time to study.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech. Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com. Mark can be e-mailed at markstout@gmail.com.