ProfessorTOSA Blog

Today I had the pleasure to meet a few of my own – one TOSA and a tech director. I’d met a tech director and been in contact with a few teachers on assignments like mine, but as to actually coming f2f with another TOSA, well, that just never happened until this morning. It seems silly really – to work in relative isolation – but my work doesn’t really fit any previous descriptions, and with the movement of technology out and beyond what has been done before, I suppose my feeling that I’m sometimes operating in a vaccum doesn’t surprise me. That said, meeting Ashley and Mike today from the Encinitas district was especially nice. It was two hours of like-minded sharing (I learned more than I taught, I’m sure) and I left with a few hopeful plans for future collaboration as well as a few new techy tools and open-source goodies that will make my life easier and hopefully in some way offer more to the kids I work to help.

Of the many that my two new friends shared, one new one, Evernote, is the most worth noting. Evernote is basically a tool to help organize notes, research, quotes, voice memos and more. With Evernote, once you have an account you can collect data a number of ways and the software orgainizes it online for you. Some of the convenient ways to get notes to Evernote include highlighting text anywhere online and clicking a button on your browser bar, email, texting, photos from your phone (it will even turn text on photos to text), voice memos from your phone and simply writing directly online. Awesome. I’ve only just begun to get into it, but it certainly will speed up my ability to take notes on the research I do. Heck, copied text online that contains links is even preserved. What’s better than that?