Today’s Dress-Down Friday has an assortment of links for you to enjoy throughout the day.
A reader named Mark sent in a list of his favorite student web-tools and I thought I’d go ahead and share them here for the rest of you because they are pretty cool. He writes:
- scanr.com – You email them a series of jpg photos of a document (or if you’re very bold a library book) and they send it back after a while in pdf format, all cleaned up and hi-contrast. Very handy in the library if you need a section of a book to read later and the book is non-lending. Plus you don’t have to pay for photocopying or waste any paper. All you need is a small digital camera. I use a small cybershot cell phone.
- Evernote.com – This is a note organizing and sharing system. It’s web based but you can get a Mac desktop client (and windows if you’re that way inclined). The reason I mention it is because IT CAN SEARCH HANDWRITING! I’ve only tested it briefly but i’d say it’s 80-90% effective, and my handwriting is barely legible. Check it out.
- Notebook – This is software from Circus Pony software. Pretty sure it’s Mac only. It looks just like a notebook, with tabs etc, but it can be expanded of course to as many pages as you need and it self-indexes. I’m considering it for next term.
Moving on to other student items and random tidbits:
- You may know my favorite tool is DevonThink for note-taking and research (see here), and I’m using google docs more and more for my writing. If you haven’t checked out DT and you have a mac you should give it a shot.
- Here’s a great list of all kinds of web-resources for students.
- And for books here’s a post on cheap, and easy ways to get your hands on “recycled” books.
- Our daughter L got to go to her first rock concert this past Sunday when we saw Feist at the Hollywood bowl. And then we found out Feist also visited Sesame Street!
- Speaking of YouTube Videos, Radiohead has a new one out for House of Cards.
- And lastly, rapper Nas and over 600,000 other people are taking Fox News to task for their continued racisim and smear campaign, Stephen Colbert Reports. You can sign the petition here.
Related posts:
- Dress Down Friday | Truth, Blogaholics, and Bad T-Shirts
- Dress Down Friday | Books for Mac, Dashboard Plugin, iPod Hymnbook and Einstein
- Dress Down Friday – Tetris-Like Quinn Gets Updated
- Dress Down Friday | Myspace vs. Facebook, Michael Cera, Body Hacks and Hobnobs
- Dress Down Friday | Attempting the Perfect (Birth)day
Loved the posts and the tips, especially ScanR… I’ll put that to good use.
But the last? I haven’t heard anything racist about Nas from Fox. If anything Nas is using the controversy to try to rouse up some more album sales. His music isn’t doing very well.
@Amy: Hello – thanks for the comment. You’re right, as far as I know Fox hasn’t said anything about Nas, but that wasn’t the point of the petition and from what I understand Nas only recently joined the petition, which has been circulating because of moveon.org for at least a month now. Nas is one personality behind it, and it may or may not be because of his record sales but it does not seem far fetched for him to have a legitimate concern in combating racism.
Wess:
Hmmm. Is DevonThink worth getting? Seems like it?
rhett
rhett, it’s been worth it for me.
Hey Wess … thanks for these tips … I homeschool and my kids use googledocs to write their papers. It’s a good way for them to write rough drafts, then I edit and comment … then they do a final edit … it’s how we file share, without paper. It also helps so that they are not tied to a particular computer in the house.