Do you find yourself overwhelmed with the number of growing apps and tools that are supposed to help us organize our lives. I know I do, I try to figure what would work best to keep my story time themes, book reviews, blogs I follow, articles I want to read, documents I created and even the the occasional grocery list. It just seems that instead of helping us these tools are becoming another organizational challenge themselves. But thanks to some great librarians and bloggers I found some creative ways to keep things organized. Here are three of my favorite programs.
My number one bookmarking tool is Symbaloo. This is a visual bookmarking tool that allows you to keep track of your websites and arrange them into "tabs"or webmix. I love the visual aspect of this tool and how customizable it is. I can change the color of the tiles, move them around between tabs, display names, etc. Because it is in the cloud I have access to all my bookmarks anywhere I go.
Another tool I am currently using is Evernote. I am falling in love with this tool and the more I explore it the more uses I can think of it. I love that I can save entire articles or blog postings, I can tag and search everything I have saved and have access to it from my laptop at home, work, or even my phone. I actually love the phone app because I can check my Google Reader and save articles to my Evernote with just a few touches. The phone app allows me to record notes- how cool is that, or take pictures and save them to my notebook. Check out this great article by Melissa Depper on ALSC Using Evernote for a Storytime Archive.
A great blogger is Julie Greller from "A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet" check out her amazing list of 136 Interactive Educational Games by Subject Area there is a whole section on library skills!
Google Reader is my favorite way to keep up with bloggers and all my subscriptions. By having all my subscriptions together I can spend an evening checking out the latest posts, saving findings to my Evernote notebooks, and staying connected.
These are just a few of the tools on a growing lists of organizational tools you enjoy using. Do you have a favorite you would like to share?
