Importance of sticky notes
Sticky notes, also known as Post-it notes, are small pieces of paper with a re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back, allowing them to be easily attached and removed from surfaces. While they may seem like a simple office supply, sticky notes can have a significant impact on productivity, organization, and communication. Here are some reasons why sticky notes are important:
1. Memory and reminders
Sticky notes serve as visual reminders of tasks, appointments, or other important information. By placing a note in a prominent location, such as on your computer monitor or refrigerator, you can help jog your memory and ensure you don't forget important tasks.
2. Organization
Sticky notes can be used to categorize and prioritize tasks, ideas, or projects. By color-coding and arranging notes, you can create a visual system to help you stay organized and focused.
3. Brainstorming and idea generation
Sticky notes are a popular tool for brainstorming sessions, as they allow you to quickly jot down ideas and rearrange them as needed. They can also be used for mind mapping, a technique for visually organizing information and exploring connections between concepts.
4. Teaching and learning
Teachers can use sticky notes for a variety of classroom activities, such as collaborative brainstorming, peer feedback, or exit tickets. Students can use sticky notes to annotate texts, organize research, or plan essays.
5. Communication
Sticky notes can be used to leave messages or feedback for colleagues, family members, or roommates. They can also be used in team settings to facilitate communication and collaboration, such as during Agile project management or Kanban workflows.
6. Goal setting and tracking
Sticky notes can be used to set and track personal or professional goals. By breaking down larger goals into smaller tasks and using sticky notes to visualize progress, you can stay motivated and focused on achieving your objectives.
7. Creativity and self-expression
Sticky notes come in various shapes, sizes, and colors, which can be used to create unique and visually appealing displays or artwork. They can also be used as a creative outlet for doodling or sketching ideas.
8. Portability and versatility
Sticky notes are lightweight, portable, and can be easily repositioned or removed without damaging surfaces. This makes them an adaptable and convenient tool for a wide range of applications.
Sticky Note tools
1. Miro Sticky Notes
Miro's digital collaboration tool offers a visual workspace where you can create, edit, and share sticky notes online. You can add sticky notes to your board, customize the color and size and share with others.Miro also allows you to to digitize handwritten stickies enabling you to instantly convert photos and post-its into digital sticky notes, CSV, and Jira tasks. You can also invite your team members and work together on a board. Sticky notes can include, besides text, images and PDFs.
Other interesting features provided by Miro include over 200 pre-designed templates, an infinite canvas, presentation mode to present your sticky notes right from your board, built-in video chat for remote meetings, interactive features such as voting, a timer, and integration with several other tools such as Jira, Trello, Zoom, Slack, and more.
Other interesting features provided by Miro include over 200 pre-designed templates, an infinite canvas, presentation mode to present your sticky notes right from your board, built-in video chat for remote meetings, interactive features such as voting, a timer, and integration with several other tools such as Jira, Trello, Zoom, Slack, and more.
2. Padlet
Padlet is an online bulletin board that you can use to collaborate, curate, and share digital content. The way Padlet works is simple and easy: users create padlets and add posts to them; others interact with publicly shared posts (e.g, through comments and reactions) or contribute by adding more resources. Posts can contain various types of digital content such as text, videos, audio recordings, screencasts, web links, graphs, images, GIFs, and many more.
Padlet offers a wide variety of interactive and collaborative features making it an excellent learning platform to use with your students. You can create padlet boards for your class and invite students to join. As a teacher and moderator, you have access to a number of admin privileges to help you make padlet a student-friendly and learner-focused environment where everybody takes part in knowledge building and sharing.
For instance, you can use profanity filters to block inappropriate content, deactivate comments and reactions, control who can contribute what, and many more. Additionally, you can create padlets that are accessible only to your students, see below to learn more about the different sharing and privacy options you can use in this regard.
3. Google Jamboard
Google Jamboard is a collaborative digital whiteboard that you can use to brainstorm, share ideas and collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. Each jam consists of several frames and within each frame you can use Jamboard's rich editing tools to draw, add various types of shapes, add sticky notes and text boxes, insert images from Google Drive or from the drive of your device, and many more. Best of all, Jamboard is simple, easy to use and free.
To start creating your jam, head over to jamboard.google.com and click on the plus sign button at the bottom right hand corner. Type in a name for your jam and use the editor to start working on it. Google Jamboard offers various ways to save your jams.
Click on the ellipsis button at the top right corner and choose from the options there: You can download your jam as PDF, make a copy of it, or save it as an image.
A great feature I really like about Jamboard is the ability to save individual jams. If you have a jamboard that consists of multiple jams and you are only interested in a single frame you can click on it to save it as image to use on other platforms or in your presentations.
4. MindMeister
MindMeister is an online concept mapping software that allows you to capture and share ideas visually. You can create various subtopics and add context to your topics using things such as links, attachments, embeds, images, and integrations.
MindMeister supports real time collaboration enabling you to work with your team on collaborative projects. Once your concept maps are ready, you can share them in PDF or PNG format. MindMeister is available on the web as well as on Android and iOS operated devices.
