Save Your Summer Online Finds for the Fall Season

 

For many of us, the summer season is a time to step back and plan the next year’s programs, explore new literature, techniques or ideas, or just catch up on the reading we didn’t do during the rest of the year. We also may not see our ensembles much (if at all) for the next couple of months. Do you ever stumble upon a great recording or article in your summer work that you know you want to share with your groups in the fall? How do you save those finds so that you know you can access them down the road when your groups reconvene? Browser bookmarks are great for common websites or services to visit (like ChoralNet!), but break down once you start grabbing too many individual articles. Saving notes in a document like a Word file can be time-consuming, and breaks down if you use mobile devices or a home computer rather than work during the summer. Rather than clogging up that bookmarks menu or cutting-and-pasting, here are three different ways you might hold on to those great ideas or resources until you meet your groups again.

 

 

Diigo bills itself as “Social Bookmarking,” but really it’s your Internet index card file– a way to save individual webpages, videos or articles for later use. There are lots of features that lend themselves to true in-depth research (such as annotation or highlighting), but the quickest use of it is to save pages into lists called “Outlines” (previously “Lists,” but now renamed). Signing up for a Diigo account is quick and free, but going to the website every time you want to save an article is a hassle. Download and install the Bookmarklet to add a small toolbar to your browser which allows to you save articles directly from the website itself.

 

 

You may want to do more than just save websites– you may want to save some notes for yourself from those mid-summer inspirations. Evernote is a comprehensive note and organization system that lets you both clip and save your findings online as well as create your own notes. Create notebooks for different types of resources, or different ensembles, and you can write down your brainstorms and save materials like websites and videos for future use. It’s cloud-based, so you can use it on multiple devices. For best results, install the Web Clipper into your browser so that you can save webpages directly into your notebooks, like with Diigo, and the mobile app so that you can save articles from your phone or tablet.

 

 

Never mind the vast bulk of noise on Twitter– if you’ve got a professional Twitter presence, you know that it’s a great way to share resources that you find, as well as pick up on what your colleagues are reading. If you find something useful, tweet it. This way you’ve sent it out in case others may be interested, and you can open up your “sent tweets” to see everything you’ve shared recently. In the fall, looking back at your sent history will show all the bits you collected over the summer that you thought were interesting or worth sharing.

 

In-Depth: Put a note to yourself as a hashtag at the end, or put the name of your choir as a hashtag to make it easier to search in the fall (“#saveforfall” or “#UHSChamber”). More-In-Depth: Create an IFTTT (“If This, Then That”) recipe to save your tweets automatically in Evernote.

 

Hopefully this helps you with some ideas of how to capture all those great findings from the summer season so that you can share them with your singers when you reconvene in the fall. Are there any others that you’d recommend? Join in, and have a healthy and happy summer. Until Fall!