If you haven’t heard of Evernote, it’s likely that you’ll be hearing about it soon enough. Evernote is a cloud-based resource that allows you to capture nearly any important element from your online life in one spot. Whether you want to collect text, websites, images/pics, important files or audio, Evernote can organize it all into a virtual notebook that is synched with a personal account and available any time you might want to access it.
We think Evernote will become popular precisely because its possible uses are only limited by the needs/imaginations of the individuals who interface with it. Of course, here at Ethos3, we immediately saw how this new tool could be used to organize and create presentations with ease and efficiency.
Collecting Research
The very first thing we do when starting a presentation is collecting research. We like to grab everything from design ideas to memorable quotes to various hints about presentation building that might suit our current project. With Evernote, you can just dive into the cyber sea of the Internet and start grabbing:
- Video and audio
- Blog Posts
- Articles
- Twitter Tweets
- Quotes
- Definitions of specialized terms
- Nearly anything you might want to curate
Building Your Presentation
After collecting a range of information on our topic, Evernote allows us to create a new note that will works as a presentation mind map of sorts. We simply create a new notebook, boldfacing the “important stuff” that will become our talking points. Once we’re ready to build in PowerPoint, Evernote becomes a central repository for all the media that we’ll be using and it even keeps track of orginal sources and URL’s so there is no backtracking required to create citations. Evernote also makes it easy to use these same sources to create signage or supplementary materials for your presentation at the same time.
Hindsight with Evernote
Evernote can also be a big help once your presentation is complete. Part of what makes our presentations stronger over time is the ability to effectively assess and keep track of our progress. With Evernote, we’re able to archive evaluation forms, websites where evaluations may be located, online comments and posts about the presentation, even all the – hopefully – excited tweets that a given audience might have shared after the fact. All of this can be stored along with the original presentation, and its searchability makes it a snap to see your track your progress over time.
