A little while back… apparently in August… D’Arcy (whom I work with at the Taylor Institute) posted about his Top Tools for learning technology. I was surprised by how different that his tools were from the tools I was using. (And he was surprised how different his tools were from Stephen Downes). So I thought I’d write up the tools I’ve been using in 2022.
- Firefox and Safari
As D’Arcy said in his post, the vast majority of tools we work with on any day run in the browser, so the browser is really the core of my tool set. For most of the last two decades, I was a dedicated Chrome user. I switched to Firefox as I started as a learning technology specialist, for a few reasons, one of which was to move my work self out of the Google sphere, and another is it turns out that Firefox was best able to render all of the other tools we worked with.
I’ve been keeping Safari around as a second browser. It’s helpful when I need to use my admin accounts or student accounts, and there are a still a handful of things that don’t render correctly in Firefox. Despite being a long time mac user now, I still find some of the hidden nature of the UI in Safari irritating, so it’s relegated to special moments. - Outlook
From an e-mail perspective, Outlook is fine, it connects nicely to the directory of all the people who work with me. I’m a little spoiled having spent years working in GMail, but baring a little bit of jank in the search feature it does everything I need (especially after some much needed updates in the last few months).
I find where Outlook really works for me is the calendar. Being able to quickly see other people’s schedules really helps to find times to meet and the Meeting Scheduler Oracle really saves time (and helps make sure that people get breaks between meetings). It doesn’t always work with faculty, but for the most part Outlook makes me feel confident everything is working. - Pen and Paper
I still find that I like taking notes on paper the best. So I keep an A4 Leuchtturm Master notebook with me pretty much everywhere I go. I’m still honing my system for notes, but if nothing else I find it pleasant from a tactile stance. I’ve been building an index of my notes using Google Sheets, which helps me go back and find the details about particular things. The process of indexing is really helpful for reflecting on what I’ve been doing (so it’s usually the first thing I do on a Monday).
- Brightspace / D2L
I spend a lot of my time in D2L (and no I’m probably not going to catch up to calling it Brightspace). I find one of the reasons I really like facilitating workshops about D2L is that it gives me a good excuse to use as many of the features as possible in a way that instructors can take to help their students. With the rate of updates to D2L it’s also good to spend some time looking at what’s changing so we can mitigate the changes and at least prepare people. - Zoom
I also try to be a good user of zoom, although without a classroom full of people on a regular basis, it’s a bit hard to experience what instructors experience. Zoom has been the right tool for video conferencing and it’s certainly the tool that instructors are using the most for online and hybrid. - Teams
I really appreciate how our team is able to share information and laughter using teams. It allows us to work in a hybrid way, and provides a quick platform to check in with each other without the “weight” of e-mail or the interruption of just showing up at each other’s desks. I don’t know that we always get the most out of Teams and it doesn’t really seem to fit into a lot of people’s workflow, but I’m surprisingly glad we have it. - Microsoft Office
I’m trying hard to use the tools that are supported at UCalgary. So I try to use Word and Excel and Powerpoint to document and communicate. I’d love to feel like they’re a little more dynamic and responsive (the Mac versions always lag behind in features), but they get the job done and if you’re patient you can almost create beautiful documents. - Google Drive
Much as I’ve been trying to use Microsoft, the fact of the mater is that a lot of people work with Google tools. So I work with Google, especially to collaborate with folks. It’s still the lighter weight, more dynamic tool for a lot of quick work. In fact I’ve used Google Docs to write the draft of this post, part of a habit from my personal blogging workflow. - Miro
Miro has worked out to be a really good way for me to keep track of what I’ve been doing and what I need to do. I don’t use it as a the collaboration tool its supposed to be as much as I might, but for myself it’s been a great place to track what I need to do and what I’ve done.
- Zotero
I don’t know that I’ve ever figured out a way that I really like to organize papers. Zotero seems to be good and does a reasonable job of keeping material together, although for some publishers it does seem to go a little off the rails. Now I just need to get better scheduling time to sit down and keep up on my reading.
I think that’s a creditable snapshot of the tools I’ve been using for the last while. As I said, I was surprised how different my choices were from D’Arcy’s. I suspect if I do this a year from now, I will also be surprised at how much my answers have changed.