There has been an explosion of apps for many mobile devices. Many offer a BYOD opportunity to increase learning reflection in a course. Here I outline how Evernote can benefit an online or face-to-face course.
The App that Organizes
There are apps that only work on one device or another, but many are designing for multiple devices (BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device). When choosing an app to integrate into your course, be sure to choose a BYOD app - one that works on many devices. The more BYOD your tool choice, the more you are sure students can use it.
Here I will discuss one BYOD app that has multiple uses in both educational and professional contexts: Evernote.
Evernote is often used as the note-taking tool of choice. It allows one to manage classroom lecture notes, meeting notes, ideas, writing, and reflections. It offers the ability to categorize and tag notes, so that finding an old note is so much easier than digging through reams of paper notebooks. One can post audio recordings, photos, and files to a note in Evernote, making it a multimedia writing experience. You can also create different "notebooks," thus organizing all your notes into themes or "books," also making it easy to find what you need (on top of the tagging search function).
Evernote has apps for many different types of devices, and it can be used in the browser on a computer as well. The multi-access/use makes it a good tool to choose. Last but not least, Evernote bought out Penultimate. Penultimate is a note taking journaling tool that allows you to actually write (on the iPad or a device that allows you to use a digital pen). For those that want to do handwritten notes, sketches, or graphs, they can in Penultimate, and it then it will be automatically loaded into your Evernote account for you.
As far as looking at universal access, the ability for students to record lectures or group meetings, or take photos of lecture boards, allows them to later go back and re-study the materials at their own pace. This is also beneficial to second language learners who may have missed some things the first time through, and can review the class lectures later.
Educators use Evernote for their own notes, but they use it in education to have students keep their classroom notes (with recordings of the lecture), and to keep learning journals, or do lab notes, or to go out into the field and do research and keep notes and files from the field. There are many uses for Evernote in education.
Some useful links on effective use of Evernote:
http://www.thesecretweapon.org/
http://sayzlim.net/timeless-evernote-tips-beginner/
http://michaelhyatt.com/evernote-tags.html