Rahim Virani's Blog

The pen and paper are great but…

I have always been a fan of pen and paper, these past weeks I was assigned an essay in my English class. As I read through the text it suggested using index cards for my research and then using them again to organize my thoughts in order to form an outline for my essay.

Almost all post-secondary students buy laptops and use them for school, in fact in an article I just read an article how 99.9% of freshmen (an american term that means those entering post-secndary) have laptops.  Seeing as I just bought myself for (for grad school) a Toshiba Satellite E100 model laptop, I wanted of course to find a good way of brainstorming that would easily allow me to from my research, make an outline.

What do I need?

Being the type of computer user and having an undergraduate degree in Information Technology (BTech.IT) I am always looking out for better ways to compute, especially software tools that are simple and that do the trick.  So I set out to find a tool that met the following requirements.

• Runs on any kind of computer operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux) – otherwise known by the geeks as cross-platform.
• Organize and re-organize my thoughts in order to outline my essay.
• Llink to other programs and web-pages.
• Simple to use

Well I found one that does this for me. Its called “Freemind” its available here.  Unfortunately it is quite cumbersome as a note taker but it provides sufficient outlining capabilities.

What do you use?

What software tools do you use to aide in research and paper writing?  How do you use your computer to aide in organizing your thoughts?