Weekly Report & Reflection #6 - Exploring Evernote

Hey everyone! This week I explored an online tool called Evernote.To put it simply, it is a tool to make notes. However it is really so much more than just that! "Notes" in Evernote is more than your traditional idea of a note. Notes in Evernote can be an image, voice memo, handwritten note and even a webpage. What Evernote does is simple yet powerful and extremely useful. It is the ultimate tool to stay organized in the Digital World.

Not only can you run Evernote on your traditional Windows PC computer, you can run it on OS X, iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and webOS! It is amazing how many platforms you can integrate your Evernote across. This means if I create a note on my Macbook at home, I can edit and view it on my phone anywhere with an internet connection. This feature of cloud access and cross platform integration is my favourite part of Evernote. Of course Evernote is not just cool, but extremely useful for educational purposes. An example of this would be the reminder tool. This tool lets me set reminders on any note within my folder, it helps me keep track of when assignments are due or simply remind me that I need to start it right away! I often use this tool when I  am working on a project; I would create a note and write down ideas and links relevant to them, then I would set a reminder for next week to finish it up before the project is due. Another feature really useful for learning is the ability to share notebooks. This goes beyond the traditional idea of handing my physical notebook to a group member. It uses it's cloud system to allow multiple users to access a notebook in order to share ideas and collaboratively work on a single project. In fact, I am using it right now with my two group members, we are working on a project about Digital Literacy. My group partners have already created a shared note with possible sources we could use!

What's great about Evernote is that it fits so many needs and thus I believe it fits in more than one category within my PLE. Evernote can really be part of "Collaborating and Socializing" and "Organizing Content". This is because it not only organizes content that I have collected, it also helps me share it with others. I will definitely add Evernote to my PLE because as I previously mentioned, it is an extremely useful tool with everyday applications! Thanks to Evernote, I was able to bring my Digital Communication to another level. People usually think of cell phones or emails as Digital communication but Evernote is a form of indirect communication. It lets you share content with others as a form of communication without a single word being said! Of course this also means another point towards my Digital Literacy as learning about Cloud technology and online sharing/storage means I now have a better idea of sharing content online now works. It is so much more than just sending a person an email, our digital technology has evolved to a point where we put content in a box in the digital world and anyone in the world can access the box with our permission!

AllThingsD, Link to source

AllThingsD is a great website about digital technology that I subscribe too. It has anything from reviews to articles about all things Digital! I found this interesting article about how Google and Amazon are building these amazing office buildings of incredible architecture.  It really reminds me of this article I saw in my reader about the Apple campus they are building in the shape of a spaceship. And now apparently Amazon is building a campus with 3 giant sphere while Google is building a floating campus! Reading about this really makes me wish that I could work at Google or Amazon. Working for Google would however require a mother load of Digital knowledge and experience (good thing I am starting with this ADED class!). It makes me realize how knowledge about the Digital world is so important. Not will it only be useful in my education and day to day life, but it will be crucial for my career especially if I want to work for tech giants like Google or Amazon!

Anyways that's it for this week, thanks a lot of reading. Just remember to check out Evernote as it is a great tool for organizing and sharing materials across all platforms online!

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection #5 - Tweet tweet

Hey everyone! Thanksgiving is officially over and I'm sure all those who celebrated this holiday is now stuffed with more than enough turkey. In this past week I created a Twitter account and explored how tweeting can help me enhance my educational experience. But before I talk about Twitter, I want to touch on my experiences on how I participated in learning from others in a personal learning network (PLN). Using various methods and channels of communication, I was able to discuss tools and topics that we have covered so far in our ADED class. I find it very interesting to be able to hear my peers' opinions and thoughts on various topics that I have previously discussed in my blog. Whether it's a comment they have left on something I wrote or new discovery they made themselves, I find myself looking from a completely new perspective. I must admit that I have learned quite a bit from my PLN. Just the other day, a classmate shared an interesting application for phones that I have never heard of but find quite useful. In addition, another classmate commented on something I posted online and shared a perspective quite opposite to mine but I still found it quite englightening as it was something I never thought of. Overall, I think learning and communicating with others in my PLN is one of the best learning experiences I have ever had and I hope to continue to explore new tools and ideas through it.

Twitter was quite a fascinating tool that I explored this week. Not only is it a tool for social purposes, it is also a great and informative tool for educational purposes. Whether you are interested in business, the arts or something like technology, there is always someone you can follow to get live updates of topics you are interested in. I like how twitter helps you discover new tools with it's discovery function. Based on your web searches and internet activity, it will present you tweets that may interest you. This takes customization to a whole new level! For example, if I was looking up the migration of whales online, twitter can link me up with groups such as WWF that cater to my interests. This is a great learning tool because if you are majoring in biology for example, you can follow influencial biologists on twitter in order to be one the first people to hear their thoughts and discoveries. You can also follow organizations like your university department in order to get updated on the most effective learning tools available to you provided these institutions.

University of Chicago; right, Tami Chappell/Reuters

Today, I want to share something I recently discovered on my Feedly Reader. This article in the NY
Times talked about 3 Professors who were awarded the noble prize in Economic Science. I found this article quite fascinating as it discussed how these professors showed that in the short term the financial market moved unpredictably but in the long term the market "moved by a mix of rational calculus and human behaviour". As an investor myself, this was very interesting as it will affect how I will handle my long term investments. Feedly has proved to be extremely useful to me as it provided me not only news of interest (like the iPhone 5S), but it also provided me very educational information like this one.

That's it for this week! I will continue to tweet through my twitter account @bwang00 so please follow me as I continue to explore our vast digital world and share all that I have learned with you. As always, thanks for reading and let's kick off week 6!

Thanks,

Billy

Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #4 - diigo it!

Hey everyone it's been a great week so far! I have a ton of information to share this week as I explored the world of bookmarking and tagging. Many people out there probably think that sounds silly! Bookmarking should be very straightforward and easy right? Well yes and no. This is because you can take your bookmarking to the next level with Diigo, an online organizational tool that helps collect and manage websites that you have bookmarked. Diigo is much more than a tool to bookmark websites though! It is a tool that can help me add sticky notes, highlight, share and tag things on my favourite websites! I really like the sticky note function in Diigo as it helps me add quick notes about things or keep a train of thoughts on a topic within any website that I have visited. This could help me academically by allowing me for example to write notes about about information that I am researching online directly on the website with the information. When I am researching how the accounting standards will affect depreciation, I can add a sticky note directly on the accounting standard website with my thoughts and I can come back anytime to that website for reference with my thoughts still there! The highlighting feature is also very useful; when reading the new accounting standard, I can highlight important points so that when I come back to it for reference, I do not need to read it all over again! Last but not least, tagging is also a very useful feature as it allows me to tag different websites and separate them into different categories that way. For example, I can tag all the technology related websites like Apple.com as "tech" and all the world news related websites as "news". This way, I can just search for a tag and find a list of all the websites that I have bookmarked related to that tag. I would definitely categorize Diggo in the "Organizing Content" category in my PLE. This makes a lot of sense as I think of Diggo as a great tool to organize all the contents I have collected on the internet.

Source: ChicagoAgent, http://chicagoagentmagazine.com/

An example of something I bookmarked this week is IAS 2. This stands for International Accounting
Standard 2. IAS 2 covers inventories, specifically how inventories should be measured, collected and presented on the financial statement. IAS 2 is very important to me as I not only use this as a reference for my accounting classes at Brock, but I also use this at work! By learning to use Diggo, my life was made much simpler to be honest. In addition to helping me bookmark the IAS 2 reference page (which allows me to access it with just a single click), it also helped me organize my thoughts on the page. Firstly, I was able to tag it as "accounting". This will be very useful as I start to collect dozens of bookmarks and when the time comes and I am in need of IAS 2 guidelines, I can simply search up accounting in the tags search bar. Secondly, I was able to highlight many important pages on the IAS 2 reference page with Diggo, this will allow me to refer to specific parts of IAS 2 that I often forget or use!

Anyways, that's it for this week! Learning about Diggo and other bookmark tools has really helped me out and will definitely save me time in the future! I hope you have been inspired by this post to take a peek at Diggo as I think it is a wonderful tool everyone can utilize. As always, thanks for reading and stay tuned for next week's post!

Billy