The best part of Friday's class for me was that it was in North Quad. As a freshman at Michigan, I lived in a tiny dusty room under a yellow sign that said in big black letters, "CAUTION: Asbestos." Not super comforting. I'm jealous that current Michigan undergrads get to live in such nice places! I'm excited to explore the building even more when I take a class in the School of Information in the fall!
In class, we gathered in our groups of 4 to explain our assigned online organizational tool. I was assigned Diigo and I really like it! I absolutely hate reading on the computer screen mostly because there are few programs that allow highlighting and annotating on the computer. Diigo solves this problem! It only works for websites, not pdfs, but it definitely makes things easier. It also allows you to access bookmarks from anywhere, which is very helpful. At the end of class we set up a SecMAC Diigo group. This will be a convenient way for us to share important/interesting documents with each other.
I have used Skype for a long time now, so I didn't really learn anything new there. I had never heard of Endnote or Dropbox before last week. I didn't see much of a difference between the two, but I think it is handy to have a place to store files online. Having another place to back up work or store large files is never a bad idea.
All in all, class was enjoyable and I continue to be amazed by how many online tools can be used to make our lives easier. I'm starting to lose track of how many of these things I've signed up for!
We were happy to have you in North Quad. When you come for class in the fall, you may get here early enough to avail yourself of the coffee bar (closed in the summer)!
ReplyDeleteI think Dropbox does a better job of storing files than Evernote (which I think does a better job storing info snippets), but that may just be a personal preference!
I have so many reasons why I hated living in North Quad. We can talk about it another time. I lived in EQ where the asbestos signs are rampant and loved it there. Little poison never hurt anybody.
ReplyDeleteI was not so enthused about the projects for class this time around. I was assigned dropbox. Dropbox is a cloud where you can store basically whatever you want, until you use up a certain small amount of space. At which point you have to pay. We've been signing up for sooooo many new sites and tools I can't remember them all.
I also have used Skype in the past, and am pretty familiar with it, but one new idea we talked about in our group was using education.skype.com which I didn't know about. Apparently this site lets you access different speakers and presentations to bring into your classroom. I'm still not sure exactly how it works, but it was something new and interesting. I also had Diigo as my assigned tool, and I couldn't figure out how to return to my highlights and annotations after leaving a webpage and coming back to it. I think someone mentioned that it works in google chrome, but not safari? I'm still not sure, but safari is my preferred browser. Were you able to find out anything about this? One of my favorite things I took away from Diigo is how it lets you bookmark sites and share those bookmarks with other people. By the end of lecture I was in the same place as you. I have so many accounts, I don't know what to do with them all!
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah, I too enjoyed having class at North Quad last week, though not for the same reasons as you. Not having done my undergrad at Michigan, I enjoyed strolling across campus and seeing some of the sights that this campus has to offer. Anyway, about your blog, I too was assigned Diigo, but I do not share your sentiments about it, sorry to come into your blog and be the rainy storm cloud raining on your Diigo parade, but I did not really see the benefit to learning a completely new tool. Perhaps I'm just lazy, which thinking about it now is probably more true than Diigo not being useful.
ReplyDeleteI agree, however, that Skype was something I am already well versed in so I didn't really learn anything new there. And it is a pain having to keep track of all of our new logins, which is another reason I don't think some of these things will be of much use to us.
I am totally with you about North Quad! I too, was an undergrad at UM and lived on North Campus... it made living anywhere on campus rewarding though? I'm not sure how I feel about residential buildings mixed with classrooms and offices. That's kind of odd to me. I like going outside, walking across the Diag for necessary access to UM resources. It's a new give and take and based on Dylan's statement in an earlier comment, something else may be afoot.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everyone that Skype was a web application that wasn't anything new to us - Kathryn brings up a good point that there is the new use of education.skype.com and I am interested to use it in my classroom one day! Maybe our generation is more comfortable and familiar with Skype since we needed it to communicate to parents/family/friends if/when we went studying abroad. I lot of my friends did this (I made the mistake of not taking advantage of this collegiate benefit, unfortunately!). Skype was used when our cell phones didn't fit the bill. In fact, I still use Skype to communicate with my older sister who lives in California. Even though a cell phone works just fine, I enjoy being able to talk to her AND see her at the same time. She has shown my family and I where she is living and the beach from outside her window, and lately, her two little kittens! (So cute!) The last time I tried to use Skype, it was acting up so I used Gchat video instead and that worked just fine.
I wish I had been assigned Diigo because it sounds promising as a very useful tool in terms of sharing bookmarks and writing notes to yourself or others, ON the website. I think I might need to look into Diigo more though since it was the last app we got to "teach" each other, we didn't have enough time for it to really sink in with me. Also, the in class Diigo instructions seemed hurried to me, but maybe that is just me. I was assigned Dropbox, which I think could be a VERY useful tool, but as Dylan mentioned above, you only get a small amount of online space (2GB) which is not a lot, and then you have to pay for more space. Thank goodness we are UM grad students and have access to MBOX! (#love)