Two years ago I posted about the tech tools I use daily. Many I continue to find essential, others have fallen by the wayside. What follows is a brief update to close 2013. Best wishes for the New Year!
Reading, writing, saving & sharing
WordPress: my blog records some of my professional thinking and life. Often I share posts with friends, colleagues and strangers but my blog is a place where I look for everything from stored links to ideas and reflections. It is my journal and publishing platform.
Twitter: continues to be a source of inspiration and connectivity. I really would hate to lose it.
Diigo: is fundamental to my organisation of resources for university lectures, tutorials, travel and school.
Yammer: I like almost as much as Twitter. Well, not really but I think of it fondly.
Edmodo: absolutely essential tool for my classes at school and university.
Feedly: has replaced Google Reader and I am mostly happy with the functionality of this RSS reader and apps.
SimpleNote & Scrivener: have bedded down as a complete system for everything I write, including blog posts. I love how I can jot down notes in my SimpleNote app and they appear in Scrivener on my Macbook Pro. It is a fantastic tool for everything from itineraries to magazine articles.
Justcloud: after a rocky start is my cloud storage solution.
Facebook: is surprising useful for educators. I particularly like the professional association presence, for example, here’s the ETA members page.
Macbook Pro (Late 2013 Retina): is really a nice upgrade – so speedy!
Chrome: the only browser I really use any more.
iPhone 4S and iPad: so many apps and pretty much the platform for all my reading and listening.
Audible: allows me to ‘read’ avidly.
Kindle app: I rarely use the Kindle much preferring my iPad which easily allows for making notes and sharing (social reading).
Overdrive app: the library is playing an ever-increasing role in my family’s e-reading and listening lives.
Shelfari: a great way to share our bookshelf online.
Booko.com.au: the only way to search for books online.
Photography
Adobe Lightroom 5 with Nik and Topaz plugins: are just essential to my workflow.
Flickr: still the best photo-sharing site.
Nikon D800 with the holy trinity of lenses: just perfect.
Fujifilm X100s: continues to be the walk around camera I reach for more than any other.
Lee Filters: for my Nikon lenses and X100s are just brilliant and add another layer of creative possibility.
Music
Sonos: has been a great purchase, not merely wifi speakers, they just keep improving functionality.
Spotify: has been the streaming service I have chosen over all the others.
Soundcloud: really is looking good and I seem to be using it more and more. I wish Sonos would incorporate the service.
Hype Machine: you must find as it aggregates music blogger lists and points to great new tunes. Sonos now supports.
What are your essential tools?
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4 Comments
Blogger, Facebook, Twitter (although I’m losing interest in it because I don’t find it interactive enough-that could be my fault), Google Chrome and Goodreads. I’ve experimented with Evernote but it isn’t really ‘doing it’ for me.
Hi
I am moving this year from a school with an in house ‘virtual class room’ system where each student was given the same laptop, to a BYOD school in which each teacher does their own thing. I need to learn a system these hols, what do you recommend? edmodo? google docs? I’m used to using the tech daily for communication and collaboration and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the challenge.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Katherine…both Edmodo and Google Docs would be great tools! You might like Class Dojo too!
aTubecatcher atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com/ is a great free tool for capturing online video. You can also use the stream capture feature, the audio capture and the burning ROM to create CDs and DVDs. There is a crop tool that allows you to take your downloads and crop them. The download feature has a conversion tool that allows you to convert your download to any file type you choose and encodes that file for burning.