Back in April 2009 I posted Evernote – a personal e-portfolio solution for students?. In the post I highlighted how the features of this young start-up potentially made it a nice solution for a FREE ‘personal’ e-portfolio (that is, removed from the shackles of institutionally bought systems). At the time though I did point out some potential shortcomings:
- lack of mobile application for non iPhone/iPod Touch and Windows Mobile users
- an easy way to privately share assests
- notes are stored in proprietary Evernote format
- the limit to only uploading pdf documents with the basic free service
Over time these original issues have been whittled down.
Mobile – In May 2009 it was announced Evernote for BlackBerry Is Here and then in December Evernote for Android: It’s here! and there have been been numerous software updates and enhancement for tablet devices when they come along.
Sharing – From January 2010 there have been several updates adding note sharing with Mac, web, Windows and mobile apps. Sharing isn’t done privately instead using ‘security by obscurity’ (having publically available notes accessed via an obscure url). Update: Oops You’ll see from the comment below that it is possible to share notebooks privately. From the sharing knowledge base:
Evernote allows both free and premium users to share notebooks privately with other Evernote users. Notebooks shared by premium users have the option of being editable by the users with whom the notebook is shared. In other words, if Bob the premium user shares a notebook with Fred the free user, Bob may choose to allow Fred to edit the contents of his shared notebook.
Export – When I started presenting Evernote as a personal e-portfolio system back in 2009 one of the questions I usually got asked is how could a student back-up or export notes stored on Evernote servers. At the time the desktop clients for Mac and Windows, which synchronise with Evernote so that you always have a local and remote copy of your files, could export your notes in a proprietary XML format. This meant you could import them into another Evernote account but that was it. In May 2009 Evernote however started rolling out html export for single or batches of notes starting with Mac (May 2009) and eventually getting around to Windows (November 2010).
File types – Back in April this was the deal breaker for me. With the free account you could only upload text, image, audio and PDF files. Having a place to also backup word documents and other electronic resources as well as making this searchable was the one thing I thought would put most tutors off of suggesting Evernote as a tool for their students. Fortunately this month (September 2011) Evernote announced that they had Removed File Type Restrictions for Free Accounts.
So what’s left? Will you be recommending Evernote to your students?
PS Here’s a collection of links from Purdue University on Evernote in Education and not surprisingly Evernote themselves ran an Evernote in Education Series.
PPS I recently downloaded the free Android App Droid Scan Lite which lets me snap and reshape pics of docs which I can then share to Evernote as a JPEG (Evernote OCR’s images to make them searchable 😉