Taking notes is a daily event in the student life. Whether you’re taking notes in class, taking notes for course readings and assignments, or keeping track of things you need to get done throughout the semester – a note-taking tool is a necessity. For some students, the tried and true traditional method of pen and paper is good enough for getting the job done. However, if you want to go digital, Evernote is a really useful tool.
Evernote is a note-taking app that works on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, etc. and allows you to sync between devices and the cloud. With the app you can create digital notebooks, setup checklists, capture images, upload images from your smartphone and digital camera, bookmark webpages, tag notes, tag bookmarks, and copy and paste online text/images into your notes. It also recognizes text within images (using OCR) so that you can search the images and text at the same time. So if you still rather take notes with pen and paper, you can just take a low resolution photo of the notes (keeping the file small), upload it into one of your notebooks, and still be able to use the handy searching feature. Evernote also allows for sharing of notes and notebooks, and so it can be used as a collaboration tool. Keep reading though because there is some fine print that you should be aware in deciding if you want to use the app…
Evernote is ad supported, which means you can use it for free because a little ad at the bottom left corner of the window is how it gets its revenue. In the ad supported free account you get 60MB of upload space per month. If you want more space, you can pay $5/month or $45/year for the Premium option of 1GB of space. If you’re just taking text notes and not uploading many images, the 60MB/month is plenty of space for a semester’s worth of notes. However, if uploading images is really important for your note-taking purposes, then depending on the file size of your images, the 60MB is going to go fast, so you would probably need to pay for Premium space. The other important thing to mention is that the ad supported option only lets people who you share notebooks with view them. The premium option lets those you share notebooks with to view and edit them. Therefore, as a collaboration tool, Premium Evernote is a better option.
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