Career Services Video Transcripts

RECORDING OF: YouTube video for Get Started guide:  Technology Tips for Time Management.

TRANSCRIBED: June 23, 2017 

FOR: Walden University 

 

(Martin Culberson)

Hello Walden Students!

I’m Martin Culberson, Graduate Assistant with the Career Services Center at Walden University.

I’m here to speak with you about technology tips for time management.

Time management is one of the most discussed topics among Walden Students, and it’s easy to see why.  Most of us have very busy lives, and therefore managing our time effectively is a top priority.

I subscribe to two key principles:  KISS and GTD.  My version of KISS is to Keep It Simple Student, and GTD is to Get Things Done; an obvious requirement to reach your academic and your career goals!

Now that we have KISS and GTD principles, how do we apply these to manage our time effectively?  First, we need to understand that information is the constant for any student.  We must find it, organize it, study it, and review it.  In the spirit of simplicity and getting things done, I use two applications to organize my information and my time:  Evernote, and Nozbe.

Most of you are probably familiar with Evernote, so let’s take a look at it first!

We are in the Evernote application.  As you can see the navigation bar is on the left.  I’m currently in notebooks, and, in notebooks we have new notebook here, with the plus sign, so you can add a new notebook.  My personal preference is to have a notebook for each of my courses; and here you see the notes section, the new note icon here you can click.  Once you click that you can drag and drop Excel files, for example; this is an Excel file…you have…image files…can be placed, either by drag and drop, or by manually creating them.  We have a Word file, PowerPoint, and the ubiquitous PDFs.  However, the most common way you will likely add notes, is automatically.  This is done using the Evernote Web Clipper.  Let’s take a look at how the Evernote Web Clipper works now.

Once you install Evernote you will have an icon that appears…an elephant icon that appears on your browser toolbar.  You will also have one that appears on your operating system toolbar, as you can see right here; and…this is a very handy feature that allows you to clip screenshots whether your online in your browser or not – you can clip screenshots from a desktop application, for example.  So, let’s say that in my current course I would like to share a bit of this programming code with some of my classmates.  I will click the elephant icon; in this case, we want to use screenshot because we just want a portion of the screen.  So…if I select this with the crosshairs, I will now check the notebook it’s going to which is my current course – you can choose any notebook you prefer, and you can add tag or a remark…and here is the clip that will be saved to Evernote.  So now we will save it, it will synchronize to Evernote, and…let’s go back and take a look at it in Evernote.

Back in Evernote we see that the note we just clipped with our Web Clipper has appeared, but if you do not see your note, you can use this sync button right here to sync up your notes, and it should appear momentarily.  One thing I haven’t mentioned are the mobile capabilities of Evernote, and…as you can see right here, the same note has appeared on my iPhone, and…it has appeared on my Apple Watch.  These are also great ways – your phone, tablet or watch – are great ways to record audio notes, or video notes for Evernote, as well.  Now, what I would like to show you, is how to take this note, and place it in Blackboard as we talked about earlier.  If you right click on the note…it will highlight it, and it will say “save as” here, and you want to save this.  So, if we go in and save this note…I’ve saved that to my external hard drive, now let’s go to Blackboard, and I will show you how to insert it very quickly into Blackboard.

Once in Blackboard, we’re going to choose “insert or edit image”; and…browse my computer to find the file that we saved…looks like this is it right here.  I’ll double click that.  We also want to give it an image description for accessibility requirements, so…we will call this Java code, and the title, we will call it the same thing, Java code.  Now you click insert, and there you have it; and…you can build your post around this.  Now, at this point I want to pause for just a minute and talk about academic integrity.  What we just did requires a citation.

Now, we’ve taken a look at Evernote.  We know how to save our information, how to quickly retrieve it in a very organized way, so now let’s take a look at how to manage our time, which is Nozbe.

The Nozbe interface resembles the Evernote interface, which is very crisp and clean; a feature that I really like.  And…based on the Get Things Done philosophy the priority inbox on the left navigation pane is at the very top; these are your priorities, the things you need to accomplish on a daily basis.  So…for example if I highlight discussion post task, you see a panel that appears at the right, and in this panel, you can set your parameters…the parameters are the project, which in this case is the Walden DIT program.  You can see it in red, it’s highlighted saying this was due yesterday at six o’clock; I did accomplish it, I wanted to leave it open to show you how to do the completion on it.  It will let you choose a date and a time for your specific task.  You can also choose a category for your specific task, which may be personal; it also will include Evernote reminders.  It also has an interesting feature where you can set the estimated time it will take for you to complete the task; and a very useful feature for recurring task, such as the discussion post…this is due every Wednesday, so I’ve set this up for every week on Wednesday, that this is due.  And…it will send a reminder, either on the application itself or your mobile devices.  And, also…for example, with the doctoral study premise, I’ve integrated this with an Evernote note, so by clicking on the little elephant icon that you’ve seen before now; I’ve associated this particular note, which it will give us a preview of.  Now…to show you what happens when you click on the Evernote icon, it will bring up all your Evernote notes…and you can actually pick the one you want to associate.  And…another point to make here, is that although Evernote and Nozbe are the applications that I prefer, at the end of the video I’m going to give you a resource list that shows you other options that you may prefer.  So, for example, you can choose Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.  And…another nice thing about this priority list and all these parameters is how well they integrate with your mobile devices.  This same screen shows up on my phone…and, I can also look at individual tasks on my Apple Watch. 

Now, let’s take a look at our resource list for everything we’ve talked about today.  We’ve talked about Evernote, and you can download it here.  And be sure to get the Web Clipper, which you can download here, for your various browsers; and, also, go to the appropriate mobile site to get your mobile applications.  With Nozbe, you can sign up for Nozbe here; and, the same as with Evernote…just – you need to find the appropriate application on the appropriate store to download to your phone or to your watch.  Also, keep in mind that Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneNote are the other options; and, for other time management applications I’ve included a link to LifeDev.  LiveDev has an extensive list of…other time management applications that are free, and premium – so, you can explore that and see if some of those might be a better fit for you. 

I hope this has been helpful for you, I appreciate you watching, and have a good day!

[This text is being provided in a rough-draft format to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings]