This is a post to support the session Mark Tinney and I did at the first Year 1 Study Day on 1 October. The heading link is to the page we used as a portal, but all those links and more are accessible from this post.
The first techie thing is to back everything up. One brilliant way of doing that without ever having to think about it is to store all your files in on the net or "in the cloud". You can either do everything in Google docs, which of course require that you be on-line, or you can use Dropbox. This is an excellent free facility, which you can use on-line or you can download to any machine you have access to. All it does is create a new sub-folder in your Documents folder, which you use to keep any kind of file, just like a normal folder on your hard drive. Indeed it is a normal folder, but with a plus. When you go on-line, any changes you have made to the contents of that folder will automatically be synchronised with all your other Dropbox folders. So you can go to your laptop, your desktop at home or at work, and find the latest versions of any file you want to work on, without you having to do anything other than save in that folder. (Of course, you'll want to take care about security.) And you can go online in the library, log in to the Dropbox site in your browser, and find all your files there, too.
As mentioned, Google Docs does require you to be on-line but as Mark pointed out, that makes it very useful for collaborative work, including overseeing your students' work as they are doing it. And it includes a good survey creator (Create>Form) which makes use of being on-line to contact respondents directly. So in some respects it exceeds the functionality of Microsoft Office (TM, etc. blah). In any case, you do not need to pay for an Office-compatible suite; OpenOffice and LibreOffice seem to me to be identical, but they are both heavy-duty packages, and completely free.
A reference manager is a very useful tool--simply a way of keeping track of what you have been reading, all in one place, and organised so you can retrieve it. If you are a non-techie person there is nothing to beat 6x4 index cards, of course, but since this is a technology oriented session, try Zotero. There is a two-part article introducing it here and here. Its major selling point (although actually it is free), is the way in which it automates collecting material; click on the button in your browser and Zotero grabs the page you're on.
Zotero also has a "groups" feature, which is a good way of sharing material and references with other people. I know you can do that through BREO, but a VLE is restricted to other people on this course, and you may want to go wider and include your mentor or other colleagues.
Speaking of which, you are part of a much wider community of people on other courses, with lots of ideas and questions for each other. Sharon Abbott, a very public-spirited lecturer in prison education, set up a network site about post-compulsory education in 2005 called PCET.net, on the basis that it was just the kind of network she felt a need for when she was doing her own Cert. Ed. Such a site relies very much on its members to create a critical mass and a buzz, and so please join it and use it; Sharon is making a big push to re-launch it at the start of a new academic year.
Part of the requirement for the course is that you keep a reflective professional journal. Why not do it via a blog? You might not be quite as outspoken as this one, but it serves as a useful example of how it can be done. You don't have to make it public, of course, or you can restrict readership to friends, fellow-students or your mentor, and you can have multiple authors if you are working collaboratively... You can set one up in five minutes or less and there are numerous free platforms out there, such as Wordpress, which is probably the most sophisticated, Blogger which is probably the best known, and Posterous Spaces, which is probably the simplest to use if you're not a geek, or want to use your mobile to post.
I use a blog to write up the "minutes" of a class, with embedded links, photos of whiteboards and even the presentations, via SlideShare. Mark pointed out that it is not always necessary to re-invent the wheel--you can search SlideShare for existing presentations on a topic, and then (often) download them and edit them for your own purposes.
C-map tools is not a particularly pretty application, but it is free and very powerful once you get to grips with it. It draws concept maps, which are not quite the same as mind-maps, but more flexible and informative. If you do want to draw mind-maps themselves, there are several free options, although many are simply trial versions. You can use concept maps (hand-drawn) as a useful in-class exercise. Introduce a topic and get the students to draw concept maps of their understanding of it; simply look over their shoulders to get an immediate impression of who has got it and who has not--the number of nodes and complexity of links is a great guide. (And tearing up efforts and starting again is usually good news!)
Consider E-draw Mind Map, which produces jazzy Buzan-style maps, or FreeMind which is much more staid but handles more complex topics and sub-topics.If you are prepared to work on-line on your mapping, and particularly if you want to collaborate, try SpiderScribe.
Incidentally, if you are looking for connections between ideas, and the topics appear in Wikipedia, you can enter the topics into C-Links in your browser, which will draw a map of the connections for you, which you can export into C-map tools. There's an example here.
Of course, while we are on Wikipedia, it is notorious in academic circles because the source material for many articles is not cited; it's a work in progress, but look at the Full Wiki site, where sources are revealed when you roll over any highlighted text, so you can cite them properly.
For presentation purposes, there is an alternative to PowerPoint--and I don't just mean the free clone at OpenOffice.org--but a much more radical approach to presentations at Prezi.
And more adventurously, see this post for some excellent contributions from fellow-students to a Study Day on how they have been using technology to support their own teaching.
And do your bit to save us all from drowning under an email tsunami.
As we went along, Mark thought of other resources:
- Sporcle is a site with many addictive on-line games, but where one can also create one's own--most obviously quizzes and tests which can be taken on-line and also scored there. Great for enlivening necessary "learning by heart" but also addictive...
- PollEverywhere is a site which lets you set up surveys and polls to which people can respond by text message, and will display results in real time.
- TED (Technology, Education, Design) is one of the glories of the web! Hundred of polished, twenty-minute or shorter, addresses on pretty well anything, by experts for intelligent lay people. Not directed purely at education, but who cares?
- And it was through TED that Mark discovered Gapminder, a wonderful resource for the visualisation of historical and statistical data.
