Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is LinkedIn for Me? 7 Reasons why it should be.

Let me start this post by saying that I am not an expert on LinkedIn. My profile is average. Some of that is on purpose (I'll explain that part in a bit) some is in the "do as I say, not as I do" category. I know a bit, I read more and I hear things from employers, I'm not always the best at keeping my profile up to date. Despite this, I'm a huge advocate for LinkedIn. I recently facilitated an interactive LinkedIn workshop for graduate students. Even though it's summer session, we had a full house! You can check out the Twitter photo  here . Referencing a previous article I used, Pew Research Center has 18-24 year olds using LinkedIn at 25%, this increases to 34% for 25-29 (Smith and Anderson, 2018). This makes sense, and anecdotally echoes what I see: students begin thinking about LinkedIn around graduation or in grad school. The trouble with this topic is convincing students that LinkedIn really is worth their time. Add in the fact that these workshops ar...
5 comments
Read more

Pinterest for Learning

The more tools we discuss the more I wonder how else we can use them for learning. Pinterest is a platform that I can spend a lot of time on when it comes to trying to find new material. I've noticed though, that I typically use it to find  ideas for a lesson or workshop, rather than looking at ways to use the platform in the classroom/to teach/as part of the learning. This sort of ties into one of our themes for this week, curation. I mostly use Pinterest to curate my ideas for things I could do with students rather than actually using Pinterest as a tool in learning. The University of Southern California Rossier Online Blog provided 14 Ways Students Could Utilize Pinterest in the Classroom . I thought it was great that #10 was Lessons on Copyright and Digital Rights  given our topic for the week! I wish it would have given more ways to use it for this, but I guess in the interest of creating my own content, I'll have to think of my own. Another favorite of mine is #12, Glo...
5 comments
Read more

Integrating Web 2.0

In learning about Web 2.0 concepts this week, I, of course, began to see Web 2.0 everywhere. I can see how meaningful the relationships can be when people, and for my work, students interact with one another and generate their own content on these Web 2.0 platforms. We love to see students engage with us and participate in career discussions. While working on a project today, I was reminded of Web 2.0 concepts although the project itself was not digital content. The task was to create a worksheet that outlined career-readiness competencies and examples. The worksheet would also have blank spaces where the students would be encouraged to write in things they have done to gain those competencies/skills ( generate content ) and space to brainstorm organizations or activities on campus where they could achieve those skills ( connect with others ).  As we were working on this project, I was starting to notice similar concepts to Web 2.0 definitions.  It made me wonder if we are d...
1 comment
Read more

Twitter

Pinterest