Evernote - an educational “cloud tool”

I came across Evernote from a  Tablet PC blog recently and looked into it as a replacement for OneNote.

Wow what a replacement it has been!

Evernote as a company have some background with the Tablet PC with the input replacement RitePen which I have previously used and although impressed with it on XP found it to be not as great as the native Vista input methods.

Evernote is now in version 3 and this has completely embraced cloud computing and allows you to provide input from many sources and send it up to their servers and then view from many devices.

They now have Windows (not just Tablet PC) and Mac clients and mobile clients for Windows Mobile devices and hot off the press is their new iPhone client. There is a J2ME client in development at the moment - but other mobile devices can email in content and view via their mobile website anything that is on the server.

So what can you input? Text, images and tablet PC ink documents. If you send an image then they will try and process that image - take a picture of a business card and they will OCR the image once it hits the server and make the content searchable. This is true of any document that is sent as an image - from either a photo or a scan.

Students can use Evernote as a central repository of their notes, and other items sending in notes from email or with a phone a nice and easy learning diary straight away. As the sharing and collaboration possibilities come on line it will become even stronger as an educational tool.

Content that is sent up into the cloud becomes accessible anywhere and that is what makes it really useful - if only someone could link the Evernote storage with a VLE that would be really interesting!

The great news - it is free to use, you get 40Mb of uploads a month for free and $5 for uploading anything more.

Please go and give it a try!

UPDATE: Title changed to remove the phrase “Cloud Education” so as not to confuse what I am saying with Judy Breck’s excellent concept of Cloud Education.

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Tags: education, mobile-learning, tools, web2.0