I’ve always loved stationery. I think it’s a teacher/writer thing.
Propelling pencils, rubbers, paper clips, notebooks…they all offer so much potential.
I never studied particularly hard at school but boy, was I organised!
I spent a lot of the school summer holidays restocking: dividers, hole punchers, pencils- all of them things of joy.
Then as a teacher there was the stationery cupboard: boxes of sharp pencils, powdery cream erasers, bundles of jotters- I can still smell it in my head.
Taking the register every morning had its own peculiar delights too – red pen, crosses, ticks, neat rows, boxes …
That love of stationery has never left me and I think if you like stationery I think you like technology too. (Or have I just made that up?)
One of the best things about tutoring online is that it has given me so much opportunity to experiment with all sorts of software.
Software that is almost stationery? I’m off and running.
I can get lost for hours. And do so regularly.
The thing is I would never consider myself a ‘techie’ person. But software is so great these days that we’re all techies.
Here is my number one favourite tool:
Evernote – I was introduced to this by Karen Sergeant, who is a great champion of all things Evernote. She uses Evernote to do everything and the more I use it I see that its potential is huge.
It stores everything in the cloud and is accessible from your phone, laptop, tablet with everything tagged and neatly put in folders .
One of its best features is the Evernote Clip, the ever present elephant head that sits at the top of my screen where you can clip a page you see and refer to it afterwards.
Its tag system means that everything is super easy to access afterwards .
You can also take a photo and it saves it to Evernote too as I did in the dentist’s waiting room this week.
If you don’t know it have a look at it- here is a good blog post to get started on it and Karen’s blog is here.
My rogue recommendation this week is Coffetivity – an app which makes the noise of a coffee shop for those who are… used to working in a coffee shop . Its strangely addictive – a bit like coffee when you think about it.
When all is said and done of course there is still a place for pen and paper.
At a recent launch of start ups pitching for business in Toronto, many of them carried Moleskines, the trendy notebook of choice these days. With sales of 17 million Moleksines last year, pen and paper is here to stay too.
So what is in your virtual pencil case? Leave comments below
