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Two Favorite New Tools

We're three weeks in and I've tried many of the tools that have been mentioned. Sometimes I only get as far as exploring the websites or apps before deciding it's not really for me, other times I post once or twice or at least lurk. However, this week there are two clear winners for me: Pocket and Goodreads

Pocket was new to me, and as soon as I downloaded it and read the instructions (I put it on my phone) I knew it would be a great addition! I am guilty of keeping far too many tabs open on all my devices. I like to read a lot of articles, but don't always get time to finish them, or I find recipes I want to save, places I want to visit, etc. Pocket is like Pinterest but I think the functionality is more practical for me. I could log in with my Gmail account, which makes it even easier and all my articles are saved right there. There's a page for trending articles, and you can even see how many times pages have been saved. This tool will be so useful in keeping myself organized, but I could also see it being a helpful to assign to a class who maybe wasn't interested in creating a Pinterest account, but wanted to curate articles for a project or save content on a specific topic.

The second tool I am glad I tried was Goodreads. I had heard of this one before, and seen Facebook friends post on it, but had never taken the time to really look much into it. In fact, sometimes I avoided reading their reviews because there seemed to be some spoilers in there!  However, with creating my account I realized I could review books I had read to get recommendations and create my reading wish list. This also seemed like a way to keep track of the books I have read. This is great because for years I've always wanted a better way to know how many books I was reading, and alas going digital just might be the answer! I was glad to have had the opportunity to try a few more new resources out this week, and look forward to learning more about how I can continue to use them.

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