Thank you for
joining me in my blog!
I have no
experience of being a blogger, similarly to some of you. A quick research on
this topic has showed that there are trillions of blogs on the Internet, and
many of them are not very informative. The proportion of helpful suggestions to
the blog posts that I would call vacuous is approximately 1:4 (of course, this
conclusion only relates to those blogs that I saw).
With this in mind,
I would like to contribute to the “bright side” and, therefore, will do my best
to make this blog helpful rather than, hmm, entertaining. I plan to post about
the technologies that can be of use for an instructional designer, learning
professional, or performance improvement practitioner. I also intend to expand
my knowledge of the Web 2.0 topic via library search and will share my findings
here.
To start, I
recommend you to become familiar with a wonderful tool for organizing web pages
that you would like to read off-line or to save forever in one accessible
place. The tool is called Pocket. What I like most
about it is that it is highly intuitive; it will take you several minutes
to figure out how the tool works. As a Pocket user, you have an opportunity to
save web pages by directly inserting links in the list under your account or
there is a more convenient way of saving via the Pocket button that you can
insert in any web browser. I use the second way majorly. Another great feature
is that you are able to tag all the web pages you save. My list of “pocketed”
web pages is very long, but tags enable me to find the needed information
immediately. Finally, I would like to emphasize that the Pocket application for
cell phones is even better than the website. And you can use Pocket for free,
although they have a paid version.
The majority of
the web pages saved to my Pocket list are educational resources and the
articles I researched for my master’s studies. It is very convenient to have
them tagged so that I can find any of them in seconds.
This is a screenshot from my tablet
demonstrating the design of the Pocket application. Sorry for the name of the categories being in Russian. They are saying "My List" and "Archive".
As you see, the application design is
minimalistic, and I really like that.
Hi Varby!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations with your first blog! I like your idea to make it useful rather than entertaining. Thank you for the suggestion of the Pocket. I will, definitely, try it.
Thanks Vladimir. Glad to be helpful :)
DeleteHi Varby,
ReplyDeleteThank you for making your blog an informative space where I can learn about tools that can be beneficial to me as an Instructional Designer.
I like the Pocket tool that you introduced. I have to be honest, I have been organizing my web pages and research through using the bookmarking feature in my browser. It is not as convenient as the tool that have introduced. I will try to use it in the future and report back!
I'm not really familiar with "tagging" my work. It is like keywords and subject areas?
Thanks for the comment.
ReplyDeleteYes, "tagging" is similar to associating some words or phrases with an article/webpage so that you are able to find the "tagged" materials latter.
For example, on the screenshot in my post, you can see the webpages that I tagged "id" (instructional design). Thus, when I select "id" in the tags menu, I see the collection of webpages tagged correspondingly. What is very convenient is that you can use any word as a tag. I sometimes use a mix of Russian and English or words that don't exist :)
I just realized, when putting apps on my new iPad, that I have the Pocket app. Maybe it was free via Starbucks one week? Or ... ? I don't recall how I ended up with it. Perhaps I should try it. Typically I just leave windows open until I get around to reading them. The items I want to save for a purpose I go ahead and save/tag in Diigo. But I don't have any way that I currently wrangle my personal reading list (perhaps because I do not value it as much, I don't know -- I could be using Diigo for it as well).
ReplyDeleteIt is funny that a similar situation has just happened with me. I started searching for the Diigo app in the App Store, and it appeared to be already in my tablet :)
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