AFTER FIVE MONTHS of using OneNote and Evermote side by side, I cannot leave either one. But I have several points of convergence where time-saving patterns are emerging.
OneNote created and posted this blog item. I wrote the text in OneNote on my Lumia 1520, watched the Lumia spell check my work, and then shared the OneNote item to my InsideView.ie blog via email over 3G while traveling in Ireland.
OneNote isn't as messy as Evernote because I had five years of Evernote behind me and I had information architecture in mind. Foremost among all use cases sits the academic work I need to share with 145 third level students. Those students are in seven different academic courses I teach. I want to emulate a course hierarchy similar to the one on Moodle. That way students could see a similar flow from training objectives to mock exam questions with lectures and practical exercises in between. This is an on-going development because I have just started using Classroom Notebook tools set up to leverage OneNote.
I did not expect either OneNote's sync or OneNote's search function to be as robust as it has proven to be this semester. I can find things quickly and offer cross-module linkages with great accuracy but I know part of the success stems from the way I set up the folders in the first place.
Evernote remains a mainstay through this progression. Evernote is my inbox and it saves an assortment of things sent to it from browser plugins, from emails and from IFTTT recipes. I mine Evernote for gems that I burnish and share through OneNote sections of academic course material.
Because my Evernote stash is so deep (and filled with hundreds of heavy images, audio clips and entire web sites), my handsets don't sync my Evernote content as quick as my OneNote collection syncs. But that doesn't bother me much since I know nothing gets lost in the Evernote cloud.
I hope I get the opportunity to share how I use OneNote and Evernote side by side in a few 2015 education conferences. Those are the events attended by Evernote fans who pointed out tactics I perfected through the years. I want to return the favor by sharing what I see in my converged use of Evernote and OneNote.
[Bernie Goldbach is the senior pilot creative multimedia lecturer in the Limerick School of Art & Design.]
