Tag: google

Why this Apple fanboy loves his Android phone

Android Phone

Some of you will know that I am quite the Apple fanboy. I currently own a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro (my second one) and an iPod touch. Having blogged twice about the apps I have installed on the iPod (during the early days of this blog), I felt it was time to confess to the fact that the iPod has been relegated to the status of ‘portable entertainment centre’. It now gets charged and used on long journeys mainly having been replaced by a HTC Wildfire – my ‘productivity centre’. Even with my deep love of all things Apple, I am not missing the iOS user interface one bit. The Android UI is just as pleasing and the phone was half the price of the iPhone 4.

Mobile phones and I

While I am a self-confessed technophile I resisted owning a mobile phone for a long time. I love technology but I felt that having a mobile phone would be too big a distraction and would put me in a situation where I am too contactable. I did not want to feel guilty if I was called and chose to ignore it. I knew that I would because I view my time as being extremely precious. However, I found myself frustrated using the iPod touch due to the lack of 3G connectivity. I didn’t want to text or make calls but it was highly frustrating to have to rely on finding a wifi signal when I was out and about. The Wildfire was my compromise then, not invoking a terrible cost to my pocket, I set up a PAYG account with Orange and away I went.

I have kept myself sane by putting in place a number of rules as to how I use the phone. All notifications are switched off so that I am not distracted. If I am doing something really important, I turn the phone off completely. I do not give out my number; only a small number of people have it. And finally, I only reply to text messages if it is really necessary. The people who do text me know this about me so I don’t feel any guilt if I forget to reply.

What I have gained by owning the phone is immense. It is my personal productivity machine; fully integrated into my day to day life. To illustrate this I am going to talk through the 10 most used apps on the phone:

The five apps I can’t live without

Twitter for Android – The main reason I bought the phone was to engage with my Twitter PLN at any given time. I tried a few apps including TweetDeck and for a while Twidroyd but have happily settled on the official app. In my opinion as good as any third party and it’s OS and iOS equivalents. I can keep up with the various streams, tweet, retweet (new and traditional methods), DM, search, even manage my lists which you can’t do with Twitter for Mac.

Everpaper – As there is no native Instapaper client for Android, I experimented with a few third party apps. Everpaper is by far the closest in matching the experience of the web and iOS apps. It is feature rich while managing to maintain that all so important minimal UI. I save a lot of reading material to Instapaper – blog articles, essays, reports… the list goes on. If I am not reading a book I will catch up with my Instapaper during my journey to work. I will also read it while queuing at Costa Coffee or any other time where I am forced to be idle and do not have access to my laptop.

Kindle – I have been totally converted to the value of being able to sync the book I am reading across multiple devices. I mean, it makes so much sense right? So I now have the Kindle app on my MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Android phone. I don’t think it will be too long before I buy a Kindle as well. I use the Android app almost every weekday morning during my journey into work. So far I have read the entirety of the following books on it:

Focus by Leo Babauta
Poke the Box by Seth Godin
Keeping it Straight by Patrick Rhone
Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Ken Robinson

I am about to start reading Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change by Keri Facer.

Calendar – This is one of the few built in apps that I use. Synced with Google calendar; all appointments, meetings and urgent stuff are added with ease. It is the only app where, when necessary, I have the notification reminders turned on for urgent deadlines, meetings and appointments. Things that it would be absolutely detrimental for me to forget. However, I do not add my ToDo list to my calendar. My ToDo list is a text file which I keep in nvALT; synced with Simplenote. As a highly organised and motivated person, there is rarely anything in my ToDo list that I would forget to do any way.

Gmail – Again synced with my Google account I rely on this app to check my personal email at lunch time. I designate times for a number of specific tasks and this is the case with email. I check my work email first thing when I arrive at work and again at the end of the day. I check my personal email first thing in the morning and at lunch time. I try to avoid looking at email in the evening unless I know there is something urgent I need to reply to and did not manage to do so during the day.

The five apps which are useful at very specific times (but not essential)

Internet Browser – I use the pre-installed web browser. I use it mainly on an ad-hoc basis, for example, if someone shares a link in Twitter, it kicks me out to the web to view the image etc. Other than that I rarely use it.

Google Reader – As previously mentioned I allot specific times to a number of tasks. Task number one every morning is to catch up with the RSS feeds I subscribe to. I read the short ones and save the longer articles to Instapaper. I only use the Android app if that didn’t happen for some reason and on the rare occasions I am not reading a book and my Instapaper is empty – i may save this activity for the journey into work.

Evernote – As eluded to earlier, I am using Evernote to maintain my organisation as I work towards an Masters in Education. The mobile app has been used for two specific tasks. Taking photos of long extracts from books where I have not been able to access and electronic version and to take photos of slides at meetings/conferences. With the auto-sync it is a fabulous tool. See Doug’s post here about how he has used it.

mNote – As with Instapaper there is no native Simplenote app for Android. mNote is my app of choice. I occasionally need to update something and so will do it here. My use of this app has decreased since I bought my MacBook Air. Due to the Air being so light, I am tending to now take it to meetings – using nvALT to make notes instead.

Dropbox – This one needs little explanation. I want access to my documents at all times. My most common use is to read PDF files which I can’t access from Instapaper or the Kindle app.

The one app that I could live without but I’m glad I don’t have to

Swiftkey Keyboard – The built-in keyboard to the Android OS was not very good and this was one of the first features that I changed. It is the only app I have installed where I have handed over money but it was definitely worth it. Swiftkey has (IMO) the most accurate and useful predictive text I have experienced between using the iOS keyboard on my iPod touch, an LG touchscreen phone, and the built in Android keyboard. Part of the reason it works is that the keyboard’s UI is so clear and not over-sensitive that it is rare to make mistakes when typing. This combined with excellent ‘learning’ algorithms, Swiftkey predicts correctly most of the time.

iPod touch with 3G?

I have been asked by a few close friends who have had to endure me waxing lyrical about the phone whether I would buy an iPod touch, should it be released with 3G. After all, I make little to no use of the traditional phone features. To be honest, I don’t think so. I have become accustomed to the Android OS and until Apple includes something in iOS that is so revolutionary, it makes the Android OS obsolete, I will be sticking with what works for me. Besides, I’m a firm believer in the ‘one thing well’ philosophy. My Android phone does productivity really well. My iPod touch does entertainment really well. I’m happy with that.

Beware Walled Gardens – Part 2

Wheel

This post is the second in a four two part series, you can read part one here. Having set out a case for social networks in place of VLEs in part one, one of my other criticisms of learning platforms is that many of the tools they come pre-loaded with are simply not up to scratch when compared to the myriad of tools freely available on the World Wide Web.

Collaboration (and a healthy dose of assessment for learning)

Google Docs does collaboration effortlessly and in genuine ‘real time’. This makes it far more powerful than its competitors.  I spent more than two years wrestling with the wiki module in Moodle before I made the move to Google Docs. I have never looked back since. The fact is that real time collaboration is far more meaningful for students. They feel empowered by the fact that they can make instant changes instead of having to wait in turn. This has been my main criticism of Moodle, many of the tools lack the instancy that I and my students have come to expect, particularly when it is available in other tools on the Web. I can’t speak to what Diipo will offer in this area but as an avid Google Docs user I can’t see it making me want to switch.

What’s more, as I have already chronicled on this blog, Google Docs offers excellent opportunities for assessment for learning. I use it on almost a weekly basis to develop my students’ peer and self-asasessment skills. I also try to assess as much work as possible using it at the formative stages. My students really enjoy using it.

Oliver Quinlan has also blogged about his use of Google Docs for collaborative assessment. In his concluding comments he discusses the notion of students developing their own workflows. This is an interesting concept, which I insert here, because I have had similar experiences. The wiki module in Moodle is quite cumbersome and in actuality rather than promoting collaboration, inhibits it. Google Docs offers multiple ways for students to collaborate, discuss and edit their work including a simple back channel. My students have thrived using Google Docs and I have found myself rethinking the way I plan these sorts of activities, trying to allow them to tread their own path.

As for security, there is little to be concerned about here. Documents are private by default and can be shared and unshared at the author’s discretion. One of the first things that I discuss with my students is the benefits and potential hazards of sharing information with others, particularly publicly. The benefits of sharing documents though are clear and I can’t think of one collaborative tool offered within a VLE that could generate or reproduce the level of creativity displayed in this video:

A range of apps with infinite possibilities

There are a whole bunch of other useful Google tools that your students can harness via the World Wide Web that won’t be found inside Diipo or Moodle. Lets start with the cornerstone of the web: Search. While some will argue that as the teacher I should curate resources for my students, which I could link to from within the VLE, I would rather teach them to make better use of Google’s excellent search engine. Rather than me trying to write about it, hop on over to Ian Addison’s blog and let him show you some of the hidden tools that can make Google search a highly valuable experience for learners.

Another tool that Google offers is Maps. For this one I’ll let Tom Barrett’s blog do the talking. He made excellent use of it during all that snow we experienced last year.

Nearly all Google apps (Scholar, Books, Earth, YouTube) offer valuable learning opportunities but none are tied down within a learning platform. They are free and available online. The only thing that will stop you using them is your imagination and possibly your schools internet service provider (you might have to get them unblocked). Every Google app I have used with my students has worked well, I can’t say the same for some of the tools I have tried in Moodle.

If you want to get more out of using Google apps with your students you should definitely check out Richard Byrne’s guides and tutorials on his blog. Or check out the excellent range of teaching ideas for Google Search, Docs, Forms, Maps and Earth from Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series.

It’s not all about Google though, there are many other apps out there that are worth using with your students. One I use a lot is Lino it. Lino allows you to add sticky notes to a canvas. It is great for starters, plenaries, homework. I can begin a discussion with it in one lesson and then re-use it for homework the next. The principal of mind-mapping or generating ideas could be done in a forum on Moodle I guess but it can’t be re-ordered afterwards, it can be reused in half as many ways. I have written about Lino in more detail here.

In a recent Moodle training session I delivered I used Lino to get feedback at the end. The 16 teachers who attended were more wowed by Lino than they had been by everything we had covered in Moodle. I wonder if its because it took them less than two minutes to figure it out. Shouldn’t VLEs be that easy?

Another fantastic tool is Voicethread. It allows you and your students to comment on text, audio and video, giving you something that can be referred back to later and, like Google Docs, is fantastic for formative assessment. Check out what David Mitchell and his Year 6 class have been doing with it at Heathfields.

Is a learning platform necessary?

I can already see that one of the responses levied at me will be: “Having a VLE doesn’t mean you can’t make use of these tools, you can link to them or embed them within it.” However, the notion of adding or embedding links within a VLE makes me ask: Is the VLE necessary at all? If I’m going to go outside of the VLE to find tools that I actually want to use and believe that my students will enjoy, can’t I curate those on a well managed website or a blog. Why do I need to invest in VLE to do that?

And in the current climate, with funding in education being the way it is, would I not be better off encouraging staff to take a pick n’ mix approach to IT based tools rather than buying into a heavy duty content management system that needs to be paid for (there are servers that need to be maintained after all) and having to employ someone to look after it? When that person is let go because the school can’t afford to pay them anymore, who is going to help fix broken VLE pages or modules? If Google Docs has a problem there are a whole team at Google who will sort it out and it won’t cost the school a penny.

Natalie Laferty responding to part 1 of this series on Twitter yesterday shared this post with me. Two students, at the University of Pennsylvania, created their own learning platform in response to their dislike of Blackboard, describing it as: “overloaded with features and dreadfully designed, making simple tasks difficult”. Perhaps, that is part of the problem; VLEs are suffering from ‘feature bloat’. If they were stripped back they might have more of a purpose.

In part three: blogging, file sharing and the importance of the hyperlink.

Image by James & Vilija on Flickr.

Google Docs In The Classroom – Part 4: What’s Next?

This is the fourth and final instalment about my experiences of using Google docs in the classroom. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

Part 4: What’s Next? (or chipping away at the Google docs iceberg)

This final chapter is a little (cough) belated and some of the ideas and approaches to using Google docs that I will be discussing are already in place.

Growing the use of Google docs

As I have blogged in a previous post I was given a spot at my schools beginning of year conference to discuss the importance of assessment for learning. This gave me the opportunity to begin to share the work that I had already done in developing the use of Google docs in both the English and Media Studies classroom. As with any presentation that I have delivered it began with some time spent reflecting on the pedagogy behind using it in the classroom.

Before employing Google docs to support my students preparation for their exams I felt that I was an expert when it came to AfL and that it was an intrinsic part of my classroom practice but using Google docs as a tool has redefined my use of AfL with my students. Some may argue that the way that I have used Google docs (see part 3) is nothing more than an augmentation of an already tried and tested pedagogical approach. To some extent this is true but I want to take a broader view of the task by considering the differences between the standard (non connected) classroom and the ICT room (connected to the Internet) with Google docs open and ready to be used.

In the traditional classroom AfL exercises between student and student or student and teacher can actually be limited by 1. time and 2. willing.

Redrafting work in books takes considerably more time than simply editing an existing (Google) doc. I believe that this can actually inhibit learning for some students as they may not be willing to put the time and effort into it. I am not suggesting that we should be encouraging students to shy away from work but I feel that ten years into the 21st Century having student re-write text in books over and over again is exceptionally antiquated. Google docs redefines this process as the technology allows the students to focus on the mistakes that they have made, working to correct them and not making them re-write sections of text that were well written surrounding the mistake.

This was the message that I conveyed in my presentation and firmly believe that effective AfL is as dependent on the methodology as well as the pedagogy. Google docs can transform the method making the pedagogy behind AfL even more valid.

I followed up the conference presentation by presenting in more detail to the English department. This included, inviting a student to stay back after school, helping to deliver a live demonstration of Google docs. In another room they sat and edited a Google doc with me. In the document they explained why they enjoyed using it so much and what they felt it offered. Several members of the department were impressed with the tool and its potential and have begun using Google docs with their Sixth Form classes.

I am going to deliver a similar presentation as part of the school CPD programme hopefully to a cross section of staff from different departments. To prepare for this I have been investigating via Twitter and the web different ways of using Google docs. There is such a plethora of material out there to draw from. Here’s just the tip of the iceberg:

As I continue to ‘grow’ the use of Google docs in school I have begun using the following video to demonstrate how Google docs works; sending it out via email and showing it to people who have a few minutes to spare. Created by Douglas Greig it offers a clear and systematic guide demonstrating “how to use Google docs to collaborate”:

[Update]: Unfortunately, the video is no longer available.

Future potential

As well as exporting the use of Google docs across the school I plan to continue to develop my own use of Google docs. I see a significant amount of potential for Google docs in both the English and Media Studies classrooms. Some uses are obvious and will naturally build upon the practices that I have already put in place. Along with assessment, Google docs offers the opportunity to teach students real life editing skills including proofing each others work; as well as making editorial decisions about fellow students work. I am looking into an opportunity for students to write separate pieces that will make up a class newspaper or magazine. After the initial writing the students will take on the roles of editors and proof readers editing each others work before it is pieced together.  It also fits in neatly with my wish to run and publish a school magazine; an idea I have been toying with for some time but have not yet realised.

Many friends on Twitter have been raving about Google forms and spreadsheets for some time now and I believe that this is a feature of Google docs that I have neglected. This is probably due to a prejudice on my part, seeing both document types as the realm of the Mathematician rather than the English/Media teacher. This is clearly, not the case and based on a lot of the material I have come across online I can see opportunities to: produce quizzes; gain feedback; and to produce documents where students could track their own progress. For example, in the English department we currently get students to track their progress in selected skills during each unit. This could work very effectively in Media Studies, where we work 100% online, as a Google form. With the ability to share access to the document I can also have a clear picture of where my students strengths and weaknesses are.  The possibilities are endless really and thus, exemplifies the fact that I am still very much in my infancy when it comes to using Google docs.

The majority of my focus in using Google docs has quite naturally centered around classroom practice, using it with students. I believe that there is an opportunity to expand the use of Google docs amongst staff in school to support planning both at the department and whole school level. Schemes of work, resources, improvement plans and even letters could be efficiently and effectively produced in Google docs alleviating the need for multiple copies of the same document being emailed/printed/re-emailed between staff members. This will perhaps be the hardest sell but like my use of Google docs so far, I will begin small and then export the use of it when I have more evidence in place.

Final reflections

I have only just begun to chip away at the iceberg that is Google docs. However, I will say from the little that I have chipped away, using Google docs with my students has been ground breaking. Why? After all, the principles of sharing resources, collaborating and accessing material from home are not new. All can be achieved through other platforms. Moodle for example, does them all.

What I think Google docs brings to the table is a system that is both fit for purpose but also evolving at the same time. Moreover, it is not dependent on a specific browser or operating system and requires almost no extra knowledge to be able to use it. As a teacher if you know how to access your Facebook account and upload a picture from your digital camera then Google docs is a doddle. Wiki’s can be over-complicated, are not real time; a forum can be too open; and Moodle as a platform needs Internet Explorer or Firefox to allow editing to function correctly. Google docs is easy to sign up to, works just as you would expect (if you use Word, Excel and/or PowerPoint) and works on any web browser. It’s a truly inclusive tool! And it’s free!

Google Docs In The Classroom – Part 3: Assessment

This is the third in a series of four posts about my experiences of using Google docs in the classroom. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Part 3: Assessment (or 1-2-1 Teaching and Learning)

I will begin this part of the series by offering a little contextual detail which will help you (the reader) make better sense of this. Year 10 students (High School Freshmen to my American peers) in my school sit exams in March – intended to be their first real experience of externally set GCSE exams. Having begun this past year introducing the new OCR GCSE Media Studies syllabus, I decided that we would have the students sit their exam module in June of Year 10 rather than at the end of Year 11. Reasons? The exam is worth only 40% of their total mark, the exam units give the students a well rounded understanding of all the key media concepts, we will have more time to develop practical skills before completing controlled assessment of those skills in Year 11. Having committed to this set up the students studied the two units and sat a mock paper in March. The results were reasonably good but there was plenty of room for improvement across all of the grades. It was here that I had an “a-ha” moment. I could use the multiple editors / real time editing functionality of Google docs to good use. What if I had the students work through each of the exam questions in Google docs, I mark it, identify errors, set targets; they go back in and re-edit; I re-mark their work and so on; allowing them to develop their exam skills?

This concept is not new! The methodolgy is grounded well within assessment for learning practices and can be achieved in the classroom without the tech. What I was hoping was that the features of Google docs would improve the process, augmenting it, so that it would be sped up, increasing the productivity of both myself and my students. My belief that this could be the case was based on my previous use of Google docs to collaborate in planning – this had successfuly improved that proces ergo it could do the same for assessment for learning.

I set about planning an introduction to what we were going to do. I brought along a copy of the English department’s marking code as one of the issues for a number of my students was not their knowledge but the way that they expressed themselves was stopping many of them from achieving the higher marks.

marking code

I copied up one of their responses and marked it in Google docs to demonstrate what a piece of marked work would look like. There were several possible approaches to this. For example there is a built in comment feature. However, I selected my own method – a mixture of my traditional marking techniques and the technology of an electronic document. I like to comment directly around or next to the error so this I retained by inserting my comments within parenthesis. I utilised the bold font feature to make it clear to the student where the offending punctuation, word or sentence was. I felt it was important to model this so they knew what to expect. At the bottom of each response I would follow another well practised feature of assessment for learning by including a positive comment followed by two specific targets to improve. What I did do however, was also give a specific mark each time, allowing the student to see numerically how they were doing. Were they improving, staying the same or getting worse? Here you can see an example of a marked first draft:

example of marking

Working in this way, with the students sharing their work directly with me, had a massive impact on my approach to both using Google docs in the classroom as well as the way I approached assessment for learning. When I started the students on improving their essay writing skills I decided to allow them sometime to work on these skills in class. I targeted specific students based on my knowledge of their weaknesses and potential and began to assess their work in real time with them. This 1-2-1 real time editing allowed me to target and support different groups of students across a series of lessons. I saw an immediate impact on their learning. Due to the immediacy of the intervention it really helped the less able students get up to speed and the more able were pushed beyond the standard they had been producing. Red pen was removed from the process and many said that they felt better having their work assessed as they wrote it because they “hated it when they had worked so hard on some work only to get it back littered with corrections”. In real time they could see where they were going wrong and correct it there and then. This meant that I could move them forward in their skills at a far more rapid pace.

I continued this process over five weeks. Every homework (2 per week) involved responding to practice essay questions (draft / re-draft), while in class we worked on analytical skills and explored the finer points of representation, institutions and audiences. This new approach created a culture of expectation. I’ll be honset and say that it put quite a demand on me to keep up with my marking. With work being submitted / updated in a far more fluid manner  it created a situtation where for once I was forced to follow my own good advice: marking little and often rather than allowing the marking to amass. Here is an example of a students work that has been through several drafts, each time given a mark and targets for improvement.

example of improved response

The results of this approach brought assessment for learning into the heart of my classroom and had a significant impact on many of my students. I have found that students are usually mostly interested in assessment of their learning caring more about the mark or grade. As I chose to combine both the assessment of their learning with target setting throughout the process many of the students became more focussed on how to improve their work than on the actual mark itself. Some became so deidicated that they would re-submit their work less than twenty-four hours after I had marked it. And some would email me if I had not marked their work in a few days eager to see how they had done and how they could improve further. Here are some examples from one student showing her development through the five weeks:

Example 1: After 2 weeks: One response has been drafted twice. Here, you can see the original mark and improved mark including targets for further improvement. There are also two other questions that have been responded to and I have marked them offering guidance on how to improve.

Example 2: After 5 weeks: Here is the same student responding to a new set of questions the week before the exam was due to take place. Her responses are excellent demonstrating a high level of progress.

While demanding, using Google docs in this way completely put the focus on the students’ writing and exam skills. The most gratifying outcome of this was the progress that they made. They felt confident walking in to the exam because of the number of practice questions they had completed and that the feedback on how to improve had been so regular. I feel that the technology actually transformed an approach that is very much achievable in the classroom. The amount of writing that the students had to do was significantly decreased. Once a response was drafted they never had to re-write the whole thing – which they would have had to do if they had written their reponse to the questions by hand on paper. This, I believe, was a significant motivating factor for many of the students; ensuring that not only the hardest working students made progress but those students who would have found the amount of writing involved (re-drafting by hand) too much to handle also made progress.

A further benefit was that assessment came to inform the content of both my lessons and revision sessions in the run up to their exam. Marking little and often, having the students redraft and develop their skills allowed me to see patterns and areas of weakness within the class quickly; allowing me to adapt what I was planning and focussing on. The impact on me was therefore as beneficial as it was for the students. I certainly plan to use Google docs in this way again next year. It is very rewarding to be able to connect 1-2-1 with m students at this level, guiding them and supporting them in their journey to become more articulate writers. It is an approach that needs forethought and planning but is ultimately, I believe, the best approach to ensuring individual students make progress.

If you would like to use Google docs to support assessment for learning here are my recommendations on how to get started.

How to:

  1. Have students use a common name for their document. Don’t worry about the name being the same as Google docs identifies for you who the author is.
  2. Have them rename the document immediately after they have created it.
  3. Next, have them share the document with you. It is useful to have a folder set up in advance. Once each student has shared their work with you put it in the folder.
  4. Use a couple of classroom sessions to support selected students in real time – create an ethos of writing, editing an re-writing.
  5. Set deadlines for drafts to be submitted but encourage students to submit early – allows you to mark little and often.
  6. Decide upon a marking and assessment system – explain it to your students and model it on the board.
  7. Set clear targets at the end of the response and allow time for your students to resubmit.
  8. Have them edit the same document to limit confusion and aid their organisation.

Next time: What’s Next?

Perfect ‘Simple’ Note Making

Simplenote

I’m always looking for ways to improve my productivity. Having been an early adopter of both Google Calendar and Google Tasks, I have felt for some time, that there was a link in the chain missing. While both apps have the ability to serve as a place to write and store simple lists, I don’t feel that their UI’s lend themselves to this function very well. For me, Google Calendar and Google Tasks are about events that are in the future: days, weeks and months away. Between them I  schedule meetings, presentations, important tasks and events; input key dates from the school calendar such as parents evenings; and perosnal events like dentist appointments and birthdays.

What I wanted, was a tool in which I could keep and access my day-to-day ‘to do list’. Stuff like email Leah’s parents to say how well she is doing or finish marking my Year Tens’ writing assessments. And I wanted it to allow me to record random thoughts, blog ideas; to keep a list of books I wish to read; and to take notes quickly and efficiently in meetings. What would be even better if these notes could be synced in the cloud and I could access them on or offline wherever I was.

Que: Simplenote; Simplenote for iPhone; mNote for Android; and Notational Velocity.

These four tools/apps have provided me with the perfect ‘simple’ note making process that I have been searching for. These apps working in tandem truly represent what mobile sync was created for and the integration is seamless. Here is a break down of how this set up works (for me).

Simplenote – To get started you need to create an account. Like many apps and tools today this process is simple and efficient. Signing up allows the magic to happen providing the cloud based storage and syncing functionality for your notes. If you’r connected to the internet, got a wifi connection or are on 3G your notes will sync so no matter where you are or what device you have at hand you can check, add to, edit and delete your notes. Once you are signed up, you can move straight on to downloading the iPhone app.

iPhone – (iPod touch in my case) – The app is as quick to download as it is to sign up for the account. Once installed you are greeted by a series of helpful notes that are waiting to help you make the best use of Simplenote. The UI is clean; adding notes is a synch and while you are connected to wifi/3G your notes will sync frequently. Therefore there are almost no buttons to be clicked including no save button – it is simply not needed. Once you have added your account info you are away. I think that the native app has the most pleasing UI and most seamless functionality so I make use of it around the house, giving my HTC Wildfire a rest.

mNote – I also needed to be able to make and access my notes while at work and with no native app for Android I searched the Market and found mNote. It was as quick and easy to install as the iPhone app and while it is a little rough around the edges in the UI department, it certainly makes up for it in ease of use. The white on black interface displays well on my HTC Wildfire’screen and has become one of my most used apps after returning to school this past week. I have used it in numerous meetings and even recorded thoughts and ideas on the fly during lessons as they have occurred to me.

Notational Velocity – The final piece of the puzzle was to find a desktop app that I could use to access my notes while I was at my school desk or working at home. This would allow for copy/paste functionality and for me to continue to be able to make notes whenever they occurred. Notational Velocity offers an extremely lite client with a great UI (a common theme amongst Simplenote apps!) and boasts an impressive list of keyboard shortcuts (included as a pre-installed note) making it very easy to use. I have already used it for taking notes in longer meetings and even wrote the first draft of this post with it.

Like Google Calendar and Google Tasks before it, Simplenote has quickly become a staple of my day-to-day routine. What do these tools have in common? Great UIs; cloud based sync across multiple devices; and ease of use. A winning combination every time!