Monthly Archives: September 2013

Today’s event featured a wide-ranging discussion of mobile apps that students and faculty might want to use (if they’re not already) to help them with saving, reading, annotating, and sharing documents. We talked about the following apps:

Evernote

• free vs. premium ($45/yr)
• sharing notebooks or individual notes
• notes can have files as attachments (PDFs, Word, Excel, etc.)
• make audio notes
• text in images you add will be OCRed if you have the premium version
• add a note by emailing it (Evernote gives you a special email address for that)
• add the clipper bookmarklet to your browser to easily add text on a web page to the body of a note

FastEver

• works with your Evernote account
• offers speedier and simplified interface to add new notes to Evernote

PlainText

• simplified note taking app
• notes can be backed up in your Dropbox account

Dropbox

• free vs. paid accounts
• useful for storing  files but doesn’t have as many ways to organize at Evernote
• sharing files or folders with others
• integrated into lots of other apps

Kindle

• can use for reading PDFs
• send files to your account via unique Kindle email address you’re assigned
• saves your highlighting and annotations (but these can’t be exported or printed)

CloudReaders

• another app for reading and organzing PDFs
• can also handle video files (MOV, 3GP, etc.)

iAnnotate

• rich set of tools for reading and marking up PDFs
• connect to your Dropbox account for file storage

CamScanner

• use your phone’s camera to make scans of documents that are saved as PDFs
• saved PDFs can be annotated, shared, and OCRed

Zandy

• View and edit your collection of saved references in Zotero

GoodReader

• PDF reader

Google Drive

• file storage and editing
• our library scanners are set up so that students can send scanned documents to their Google Drive accounts (they can check to see if the transmission of the document from scanner to their account by logging into the Google Drive app if they have it installed on their phone)