Handy tools
Students and Staff use handy online collaboration tools to communicate with each other as well as to facilitate the academic learning environment. These tools are usually easy to find online, and are mostly compatible and simple to use. Although online collaboration tools may seem as a superfluous technology of the younger generation, it does allow for new and efficient ways to share ideas and gather information without too much effort. ICTO keeps track of all the newest collaboration tools to keep the staff informed about the newest technologies that can enhance learning. Below you can find these handy tools. Please contact us anytime you need help or want to get started with any of these handy tools.
Delicious
People usually bookmark interesting websites in their web browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari), but access to these bookmarks is difficult from different locations. Bookmarking in a web browser also makes your bookmarks inaccessible to others and takes time to organize. Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that helps you store, share, and find your favorite websites efficiently. By using tags, delicious users can easily categorize and share their bookmarks with other users interested in similar topics. The strength of this collaboration tool lies in the extent in which people make their bookmarks public. Through tags colleagues can work together easier and relief the worry of constantly forwarding interesting websites, online videos and articles.
Delicious also allows you to access your favorite bookmarks anywhere at anytime. Using rss-feeds, it enables you to view your bookmarks on computers, smartphones or any other device with Internet access. With Delicious you will never be outdated with interesting websites ever again!
Zotero
Zotero is an open-source plugin that you can install in Mozilla Firefox to help you collect, manage and find references of academic articles, books and webpages. Apart from managing references from the Internet, this plugin can also import references in Microsoft Word or other word processors (e.g., Open Office), similar to software like EndNote.
Once you have established an organized reference database, you can easily add annotations to your references. There are also various styles one could use when adding citations and bibliographies. Zotero makes finding and organizing references much easier.
Slideshare
Slideshare is an online slide and ‘webinar’ sharing service.You can upload PowerPoint, PDF or OpenOffice files in the <similar manner as YouTube. Just like YouTube, Slideshare presentations are simple to embed in, sync with or feed into other websites. Furthermore, Slideshare is designed to initiate and facilitate discussions within a easy-to-work-with web based environment. Below every opportunity viewers can comment on any given presentation.
It is almost impossible that you have not heard of Twitter. Twitter is a micro-social messaging tool that is changing social and political configurations around the world. It enables users to send and read so-called ‘tweets’. Tweets are short (140 characters) text-based messages displayed on a user’s profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users can subscribe to the tweets of friends and colleagues, but also well known figures around the world to stay updated with interesting things. Nowadays, even politicians and academics are using Twitter to broadcast their intellectual thought to a large part of the population.
Prezi
Prezi will soon change the way people present. It is a web-based presentation-software application and narrative tool that can easily be exported to your personal computer. The fun and novel aspect of Prezi is that it uses a single 3D canvas instead of linear powerpoint sheets or static overheads. Prezi allows you to rework a mindmap into a coherent presentation.
Mendeley
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.You can automatically generate bibliographies, Collaborate with other researchers online, import papers from other research software, find relevant papers based on what you’re reading, access your papers from anywhere online, and read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app
Schoolforge
Schoolforge offers a collection of educational technologies. Their mission is “to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. We advocate the use of open texts and lessons, open curricula, free software and open source in education.”