When I think about it, I spend quite a considerable proportion of my day online… whether that be checking email or RSS feeds on my phone in the morning, using web-based resources in the classroom, or general browsing and other work on my computer at home at other times.
I’m becoming increasing reliant upon web services to help me to organise my life and make things easier and / or quicker. There are lots of tools out there and many of them look very useful. So, it can be difficult to fight ‘Feature Creep‘ and try not to keep adding new online distractions to my daily routine.
However, there are a number of web tools that I use on a daily basis, and which I would find it difficult to now go without. I’ll probably talk about some of these in more detail in future posts, but here’s an outline of my favourites:
Google Reader was probably the first online tool that I began using on a daily basis. I started subscribing to RSS feeds using Vienna. However, I remember coming home from a holiday one day to find hundreds of RSS posts which needed my attention. So, I decided to look for an online option which I could use to check feeds when I was out and about. Google Reader fits my needs perfectly and it has a great mobile interface too. The ‘starring’ option is also useful for scanning through posts and picking out ones to look at in more detail later.
I haven’t used Google Docs much in the classroom yet (see Tom Barrett’s blog for some great info about his work). However, Google Docs has been great for other work, where I may start a document in school, and finish it at home. It’s also great for planning my wedding next year, as I can share files with my fiancee / family / friends and update things wherever I am.
EverNote is my second brain. It lets me store notes and images that I need to remember, or keep for reference, and these are all then synced between different computers. They are also accessible online via the web (and with a fantastic iPhone interface). A very useful service.
I signed up for a delicious account quite a while ago, but I didn’t use it to begin with as I didn’t really see the point. I knew most of the websites that I wanted to visit (or so I thought) and a quick Google search usually helped me to discover more. However, I’m now finding delicious to be an incredibly useful way of finding out about new and useful sites. Having a network of friends who follow each other’s bookmarks is an amazing way to make discoveries. Every teacher should have a delicious account!
Twitter is another one of those things I signed up to without really understanding what the point of it was. I started off by posting the odd update telling people what I was doing, but that was about it. However, after finding new friends and like-minded colleagues, Twitter is now becoming a key part of my work online. Help is often just a quick message away, and it’s a great way for teachers to learn from each other and share ideas.
I’m a bit of a backup addict! I try to make regular backups on external hard drives / DVD etc, but have always worried what might happen if those backups got damaged or lost. So, I signed up for JungleDisk. It’s a piece of software which lets you backup your files online to Amazon’s servers. Another bonus of the service is that they offer a web-access upgrade. This gives me a complete backup of my documents online which I can access via the web from anywhere. This has ‘saved my bacon’ many times when I’ve forgotten to bring a particular flash drive to school. I can just connect to my JungleDisk and download the online backup of the file I wanted!
Although Toodledo is last on this list, it’s definitely the one that I use the most. I’ve always kept lists of things to do, but losing the paper I’d written them on was an occasional problem! Toodledo is an online ‘To Do’ list. It is incredibly flexible and has options for setting start / due dates, repeats, task lengths, folders / contexts and much more. There is also fantastic Twitter integration which allows you to add new tasks via Twitter (and therefore via SMS when you’re away from a computer). I find this really handy… if I think of something that I need to do, I send a text message to Toodledo and then I can forget about it until Toodledo reminds me that it needs to be done. There are currently 181 things on my Toodledo list, so I’d better stop blogging and get on with them!
How about you? Which online tools could you no longer live without?
