Scarlet Umbrella|Adventures in Mobile Technology

I brought my tablet to a meeting of a bunch of my fellow graduate students.  The consensus was that my tablet was pretty cool.  It manages to solve two problems that most graduate students have:  we have heavy laptops and we have to lug around a lot of papers.  My tablet is *light.*  It weighs about three pounds and I can save all of my papers onto it.  I am able to carry it to meetings and take notes without causing a distraction as well as have all my notes and my agenda with me.  In this particular meeting, I was able to access the internet and pull up the fall class schedule and have it as a reference for the group.

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When I first got a tablet, one of my coworkers asked if I knew whether or not you could install Linux on it.  My response was probably, although you would kill all the tablet functionality.  I think one of the signs that tablets are finally being appreciated, at least among geeks, is the growing interest in creating a tablet PC Linux distro.  I found this discussion on what could be included in a tablet PC version of Ubuntu interesting.  Although I am perfectly happy with Win XP Tablet PC edition, I figure all software development in the tablet PC world is a good thing so I add my vote for a tablet PC Linux distro.

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Part of the reason for my month long absence was the fact that I was involved in applying for two positions. The first was as a temporary guest worker in a government research facility. I am going to make a protein with a colleague at this facility and to be legal, I had to fill out an application and send them my curriculum vitae among other things. Sending them my curriculum vitae proved to be a bit of a challenge since I had never created a c.v. and I hadn’t updated my resume since I applied to graduate school four years ago. So to the other students and fellow workers out there, let me reiterate the advice that your counselors gave you to keep your resume updated. You never know when you might need to send it in to meet security clearance at a government facility.

The main subject of this post is leveraging the extendability of OneNote. Or “it’s really easy to fix OneNote to suit your needs.” The one thing I did miss when I made the decision to try to go as paperless as possible was my daily planner. I use Outlook combined with TEO 3.0 for the majority of my planning. I have Outlook organized so that when it opens, I view my calendar along with my tasks organized with custom categories. This approach works really well for helping me see what is going on while avoiding the time sink of reading my email immediately when I get to work.

Still, there are definitely times when physically writing a list of what I have to do helps organize my thinking. I have to give credit for this idea to Tracy Hooten of The Student Tablet PC.  What she did was create custom stationary for OneNote using the D*I*Y Planner templates- a set of custom templates so that you can create your own paper planner.

This year in addition to my normal tasks as a grad student doing research, I am also going to be doing some teaching and will need to design some lesson plans.  Back when I was using a paper planner, I had used some templates from the D*I*Y planner and I decided to check and see if they had any templates that would be of use for teaching.  It turns out that there is a whole set of templates devoted to teaching. I downloaded the templates and used Adobe Reader’s clipping function to create images of each page that I wanted. I then imported the images into OneNote and set the images as background. I could then use the templates as OneNote stationary. So now I have templates for lesson plans as well as GTD-related teaching tasks in my OneNote notebook. Pretty cool.

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