Zotero has become my favorite tech tool for three
reasons. I have had great success organizing my personal citations,
collaborating with my peers in coursework, and building group a group
library for my field. I use Zotero as a giant net to catch all of the
citations relevant to my courses and research. Every course has its
own folder with subfolders for the syllabus, seminar discussion, and
research paper citations. I have also used Zotero to organize my
dissertation research, which at this point consists mostly of archival
sources.
With a few fellow Zotero-using grads, I have also benefitted from
setting up a Zotero group library for directed readings. Without the
weekly presence of an instructor, the Zotero library has been a great
way to maintain some structure in sharing notes and reflections while
also allowing us to share readings in a digital format. Finally, I
have set up a group library for the Football Scholars Forum, an
organization I co-founded to discuss recent works in soccer
scholarship. Three semesters into the project, the Zotero library has
become an invaluable resource for sharing citations, syllabi, and
ideas for future sessions.
I have a good long list of tech tools that make my
life better as a graduate student. But my most favorite are the ones
that make collaborating with others a breeze. For this there is no
easier to access that Google’s tools: Google Docs, Spreadsheets,
Forms, and Presentations. With these now integrating with Google+
Hangouts, collaboration is made much, much easier.
On Google Docs, I can now share with a few people via email or via a link. I can restrict access to view only, comment only, or full-edit. It is even easier with the sharing via a link feature for others to edit: they don’t even need an account with Google to open up the document and experience the full-functionality or editing or commenting. With the Google+Hangouts with Extras, up to ten people can be synchronously interacting in a multi-party video chat, and in the middle will be the Google document. All members can see the editing in real-time andd iscuss it. Finding common time to collaborate has never been easier.If it’s been a while since you’ve looked at Google’s suite of collaboration tools, it is worth a look again.
Katy Meyers
Like Andrea, I also have a long list of tech tools that
help me out on a daily basis, especially Google tools and Twitter. But
if I narrow it down to the tool which has helped me out the most in my
professional life it would be WordPress. WordPress is a open source
publishing tool, and is specifically tailored to blogging. It comes in
two forms, the dot org version, which is downloaded to a server and is
more flexible, and there is the dot com version which is hosted by
Wordpress and allows for more basic blogging. Both are easy to use for
basic posting, although much more can be done with it if you work with
the plug-ins and know HTML or CSS.
I work with WordPress every single day. I use it in my job, for one ofmy classes and for non-academic blogging. Most importantly, I use it as a personal website. One of the most important things in my discipline, archaeology, is staying on top of current news and journal articles. I began the blog as a way to force myself to stay up to date with journal articles by writing short posts summarizing them. Now that I’m doing an independent study in mortuary archaeology, putting them on my blog not only keeps me on task but means that I have to do good work. My WordPress is more than a blog, its also where I put my CV, contact information, and professional work. More than anything else, my blog and website has been a major boon to my professional development.
Categories: Technology
HLS 
Yay WordPress! Over the summer, I took over webmaster duties for my school gov. association and I installed WP on our domain. It has seriously made it so much easier for everyone in the group who needs to get information out onto the page. I love it!
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Feel like I have been living under a rock…just discovered google docs…so easy to use and having the ability to collaborate with another student on a project was thrilling.
I work in an elementary school and introducing students to this type of product could be interesting. Going to start with gaggle.net because of the safety of the secure network and ability for teachers to see all activity.
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Thank you Alex for the post about Zotero! I have been using Endnote, but decided to check out Zotero after reading you post. I love it!!! It will be extremely helpful for a huge annotated bibliograph project I’m doing this quarter! It is so easy to use. I even recommended it to others in my class. THANK YOU!!
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