Organisational+Tools

 toc =Organisation= Organisation is becoming an increasingly important skill to teach students and to manage the volumes of information that we are bombarded with every day. Effective organisation is centred around simplicity, using tools that are part of our everyday lives.

=iGoogle= The dominance of Google is not simply derived from good marketing. The reality is that Google makes very useful products. One of these products is //iGoogle//. By creating a Google account, users can create their own personalised homepage. On this page, users can add their preferred "gadgets" which they select from a sizeable list. The result is a homepage that is based on your own interests with up-to-date news, weather and other events. Users can also have gadgets for other useful products such as Google Calendar, Google Reader or Evernote.



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 * Here is an instructional video to help get you started.**

=Google Calendar= Google Calendar can be useful on a number of levels. Firstly, students can create their own and add it to their iGoogle page. Through this, they can add their classes, due dates, homework and any other information they see fit. This should not replace the College Diary; rather, it should supplement it.

=Evernote= Evernote is an incredibly powerful program for making notes. There are many notemaking programs about, but this one effectively synchronises from the internet to home and even to mobile devices. Notemaking becomes portable and paperless, and they can easily be shared between users.



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=RSS= Forget about what the abbreviation means, RSS is a way of keeping up to date with sites that are updated regularly. These sites include news sites and, as is the case here, wikis! The point of subscribing to RSS feeds is that you can get up-to-date news from your favourite sites all in one go. When your favourite blogs have been updated and your favourite columnists have produced new articles, you can have it on your computer or phone immediately.

RSS requires a subscription to the feed through programs called aggregators. But do not despair, Google has a free product called Google Reader which you can use to subscribe to RSS feeds. Moreover, it can be embedded in your iGoogle homepage so that you can check for update to your subscriptions easily. You can subscribe to this wiki by first setting up your RSS aggregator (Google Reader, Feedreader etc.) by visiting this page. The video below gives and explanation of how Google Reader works. It's quite a useful starting point.

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=Del.icio.us= Del.icio.us is a bookmarking tool that can be embedded into your browser as a way of organising and sharing your bookmarks. The tag cloud below belongs to Bruce Derby at Mazenod College. The larger words in the tag cloud mark those terms with the greatest number of tags associtated with them. On the homepage for this wiki is a tag roll for the key terms and themes that arise in this wiki.

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