I have been thinking a lot about notebooks and organization…

One of the reasons that therehas been such a big gap between my posts, is because I was ill for an extended period of time. As a result of that illness,I have some limitations particularly around keyboarding and handwriting  so I do a lot of dictation. The other thing that has changed for me is that many of the things that I used to keep in hardcopy, simple things like phone messages and grocery lists, I now keep electronically. I have become enamored of a program called Evernote. I am a total convert.

Evernote is an online set of notebooks. An analogy that I often use with students is to think of it as a set of three ring notebooks that you can carry around on your phone.  I am not a particularly organized person by nature, but Evernote has helped me to remember many of the things that age and my innate mental chaos would normally allow me to forget.  I have been talking with classes and groups about Evernote this year. I have enjoyed the give-and-take with student users about how they use it, and the  brainstorming about how they will use it in the future. We even have an instructor who has asked that all of her classes open accounts. I am looking forward to seeing what use they make of it.  A wealth of information about the program is available here: www.Evernote.com

This is the beginning of the semester, and so this is the time that students are establishing the way that they will go forward. The habits that they set in place now and the tools that they begin to use are more likely to stay with them than those they begin to use later in the semester. Having regular habits for managing all of their stuff is critical at the college level. My big themes around organization have always been that whatever system they decide to use should always be:

1. First of all consistent. Most students have a great deal that they have to remember, particularly here at VTC where we are primarily STEM programs.  They carry very high credit loads, do a lot of reading, and generally speaking have a lot of work to get through each week. If they have a different organizational system for each class, they just complicate their lives so unnecessarily.
2. Second, the system should be expandable. A first-time freshman has absolutely no idea how much stuff they are going to need to keep organized. I have been here for 10 years, and I had two children come out of high school and go through college. I have seen very well prepared students, and very poorly prepared statements. The one thing that they have in common, is that none of them have a clue about how much stuff there really is. It is important for their organizational system to be expandable so that they have a way to fit in all of those bits and pieces that they may lose track of in a logical way.
3. The third thing that I think it’s really important is that the system has to be flexible. A flexible system, regardless of whether it is pencil and paper or electronic, allows you to accommodate the vagaries of different situations without throwing your entire organizational strategy out the window. Too many times, we become entranced with elaborate organizational schemes that look like they have the answer to all of our issues, only to find out that the schemas itself is more work than it is worth. A simple system, one that suits the work that you were doing, and allows you to make adjustments, is the best.

I used to talk with students about three ring notebooks as a model for an organizational system. They are a flexible place to capture the details of student life, they are expandable, they can be organized in a consistent fashion across all sorts of coursework.  Electronic workhorse applications like Evernote can serve the same purpose, with the added benefit of being extremely portable. After all, we all carry a phone…