It’s sailing season. We started back on the 28th of February, which can only mean one thing: I’m on the run. I’ve also become sucked into Twitter, Diigo, Facebook, my Google Reader, Pinterest, and a host of other online tools thanks to my colleagues at EdTechTeacher. So, while I’ve been writing frantically on a myriad of other tools, this blog has been lacking any articles for the past few weeks.
Back to my post…. On Tuesday, I worked with a group of new sailors. We covered some essential concepts on land – namely, parts of the boat and sail. While this may seem trivial, you try explaining to a cold, wet, 14-year old to “pull the purple line on the left side of that white thing you’re sitting on” over 10 knots of breeze and an outboard engine. About half-way through our lesson, I looked at my groups slightly glassed over expressions and said, “go get a notebook and write all of this down.”
As the words came out of my mouth, I stopped in my tracks, turned to them and then said, “No, wait, go get something to keep track of this information. I don’t care if it’s a notebook, a Google Collection, Evernote, or apps on your phone.”
Welcome to coaching in the 21st Century! To be honest, I think I would prefer that they get organized on their phone. This way, they could have all of the PDFs, Google Docs, photos, videos, notes, animations, etc. that we send them all in one place. My only criteria for how they aggregate all of this information is that it has to be mobile. When we travel, I want them to have access to a rule book, a play book, the team racing call book, a boat set-up checklist, and a host of other things. A 3-ring binder can do most of this, but a device could be even better.
Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers. Yesterday, he published a presentation file, Best of the Web 2012. It’s embedded below. The presentation covers 70 tools in 60 minutes – even more impressive than the 30 tools in 40 minutes that he discussed during our EdTechTeacher webinar a few weeks ago. I’ve added it to this post as proof for why I’ve reconsidered the concept of the sailing notebook. Personally, I think I would use Evernote…
[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”present/embed” query=”id=df6bwk2v_694cjtc6kfm” width=”410″ height=”342″ /]