21COFH - Educational Materials - Week 38

Last week our project was to work with digital educational materials. This week, we tackle the paper. If you have been involved with family history and genealogy for a while, I'm betting you have a ton of handouts, syllabi, workbooks and notes from classes, meetings and conferences. It will be much easier to refer to them if they have been digitized and are searchable.

The steps are similar to last week with a couple of additions:

1. Utilize your organizational scheme.
2. Consider the use of metadata.
3. Decide what to digitize (and what to even keep at all for that matter).
4. Scan away.

I have several mini projects to choose from and I'll bet you do to. Here's what I have:

1. Several three ring binders of handouts and notes from society meetings and seminars. All nicely organized by topic and/or location. These go back to the 1990s when I first started seriously researching.
2. More recent notes and handouts that somehow landed in a pile instead of the file.
3. National Institute of Genealogical Studies (NIGS) courses. Four of those 3 inch binders full of material. Why I didn't download the materials when I had the chance, I'll never know. But I could make a serious hole on a shelf by digitizing these.
4. National conference and Family History Expo syllabi. These suckers are big and would also clear up some serious shelf space if they were digitized.

Tip: Evernote is perfect for a project like this. The free account will scan your image files and make both printed and handwritten text searchable. The premium account will also do this for PDFs.

What materials can you digitize and clean out this week? Let us know in the comments or a post of your own and leave the URL in the comments. I'll have the results of my project up tomorrow.


URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/09/21cofh-educational-materials-week-38.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

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RootsTech

Well, I'm still recovering from a busy couple of weeks at SLIG and RootsTech but I do want to share what I learned. There is such a wide variety of sessions to attend, I decided to focus on those that could help progress family history here and now.

One-step Webpages by Stephen P. Morse: A Hodgepodge of Lesser Known Unrelated Problems

Part of the reason I chose this talk was because of the presenter. Stephen Morse made a significant impact on the lives of millions of people with the 8086 processor and now with his One-step Webpages he continues to have an impact. I was curious. What is he like? Well, he is brilliant and funny. I left feeling more comfortable using his website which I admit I have used very little up to now.

E-learning Software and Authoring Tools for Genealogical Education– Mark Lowe
Initially I wasn't sure whether to attend this session or not. Boy am I glad I did. Mark alluded to this session in his 2 hour presentation, at the APG conference on Wednesday, titled “Developing Advanced Research Plans While Staying on Track in a Modern World,” so I decided to go. One of the tools I learned about is Screencast-O-Matic, an online screen recorder. I see a future YouTube channel or even including video in this blog, if I can figure out how...

The Powers of Evernote: Photos, URL’s, Censuses, Geo-location, and Stories - Tevya Washburn and Kurt Francom

Being a huge Evernote fan, I was definitely looking forward to this presentation. While it was oriented toward beginners, I came away with a better understanding of several aps that work with Evernote such as:

• Skitch - a drawing tool.
• If This Then That (ifttt.com) - a rule setting ap that can be plugged into Evernote, Facebook, gmail and other. It's used to create rules so for example, you could set up a rule if you post to your blog, then ifttt saves into Evernote.
• Shoeboxed.com allows you to send shoeboxes of photos and documents. They scan and push to your Evernote acct. Then you can tag, etc. if you want.

By the way, did you know the syllabi are available at the RootsTech website for anyone to download, whether you attended or not?

I'll have more in the next day or two. Right now it's time for some rest and NCIS.


© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum