Friday, August 31, 2012

Organizing Conference Notes

My friend and fellow library media specialist Debra Truss recently queried the NYC School Librarians List (NYCSLIST) the following:

I have now had the pleasure of working as a librarian for five years and during those five years have attended many wonderful PD [professional development] events for librarians and teachers.  I have learned many valuable skills and gleaned inspiring ideas from colleagues at these events.  All of these are recorded as notes, or on handouts, in folders, etc.  They are starting to really pile up, and I am sure I will only be collecting more as time goes on.  I don't want valuable ideas to be lost in a pile!

So I am wondering, how do all of you organize your PD notes and materials so that you can use them for reference effectively?

This was my reply: 

I have my notes from various workshops and conferences (now mounting up!) in a variety of formats:  "old-school" paper notes shoved into manila folders, or notes filling up the nifty little journals that are handed out at conferences.  Occasionally I peruse these and flag with Post-its or mark up in highlighter anything that seems pertinent at the moment.  I've also scanned many of these into PDFs and saved in Dropbox, where I've created folders (time-consuming).   Then there are the notes that I've typed up in Word or Google Docs (now Drive).  Relevant websites that are mentioned during talks I bookmark in Diigo (useful because you can tag them); and--more recently--apps on the iPad like Penultimate and my current favorite--Notability, which has an audio record feature and ability to organize into folders (but, alas, no tags).

How do you organize your notes?  

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