The debate team at my school began using Evernote last year for collaborative research. As students find sources, they dump them into a shared Evernote folder that everyone on the team has access to. Our effort is multiplied, as students collaborate on finding and writing up evidence.
This year I’ve discovered a tool that makes Evernote even more powerful. If This, Then That (or IFTTT) is a service that allows users to link any number of websites and web-based services: from widely-used services like email, SMS, Dropbox, Facebook, and Google drive, to lesser known services like Svpply, Pocket, or ffffound! Using a clean and easy-to-use interface, IFTTT guides users step by step in creating “recipes” to link services. If you’re looking for inspiration, you can browse through the hundreds of public recipes created by IFTTT users. The recipes include everything from “download emailed Paypal receipts into Evernote” to “automatically change my Twitter profile picture when I change by Facebook profile picture.” You can even have IFTTT text you when it’s going to rain.
IFTTT can be combined with Evernote to make a powerful collaborative research tool, because it allows you to combine the collaboration and cloud-access of Evernote with the easy access to information offered by RSS feeds.
Here’s an example:
Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: If Then Online RSS Tool”
