Last night I answered an email from a reader named Melissa who had a question that I’m asked on a fairly regular basis so I thought that I would my response into a blog post. Her question was,

“I was wondering if you knew of any way for students to track and mark off their learning tasks as they go throughout the day. I just want a really easy to-do list that my kids can easily ‘check off’ as they go and see how much they have accomplished.“

There were two options that immediately came to mind when I read Melissa’s question. First, was StrikeApp. Strike App is a simple to-do list creation and management tool. To use Strike App just title your list of things to do and start typing your list. When you’ve completed a task just come back and strike it out by clicking on it, dragging it off the screen, or “x-ing” it out. You can share your to-do lists by sending people the link to your list. For those people who like to experiment with different backgrounds and themes, Strike App offers a handful of designs to choose from.

The second option that I recommended to Melissa was FetchNotes. Fetchnotes is a neat service for creating and keeping notes online. Fetchnotes uses an interface for creating and sharing notes that will feel familiar to Twitter users. When you write a note, just use a hashtag to label your note. Then whenever you want to search for a note just enter a hashtag. For example, if I was a student taking notes in a history course I might use the hashtag “#revolution” for all notes related to revolutions. Then I could go back and read all of my notes about revolution by just searching for that hashtag. When you want to share a note with someone in your contacts you can do so by just putting “@” before the person’s name. Fetchnotes works on the web and offers Android and iOS apps.