Alrighty, I realised that a bunch of lecturers don’t share all these super useful tools with their students to help them in general and specifically now that most colleges are closed due to the pandemic. So, seeing as my college course (Digital Humanities and IT) mainly focuses on digital learning and how to make these handy tools open access and encourage their use that I would make a compiled list of all the ones I know of and use, If you have more that are helpful that you use comment them below and I will add them after I’ve checked to make sure they’re not like a virus or some bot link!
*SOME OF THIS WAS TAKEN FROM MY LECTURERS (sorry guys but you already made some handy lists) I’LL COLOUR CODE THEM SO YOU KNOW THEY’RE NOT MINE AND TO GIVE CREDIT*
GENERAL STUFF I FORGET PEOPLE DON’T REALLY GET TOLD:
-Use YouTube for everything, if it is a thing YouTube has a tutorial for it and you should check it out. New tool your using for analytics? YouTube can teach you. Physics problem you cant get your head around? YouTube.
-TED talks are super handy, sometimes the person giving the talk is annoying and has a punchable face I know buuuut, they have good information and often they will cite their sources underneath the videos which you can use to get more information on your topic.
-Wikipedia is awesome and usually when people go on about wrong information it on celebrities pages and done by tabloids, Wiki has people who review and fact check changes made to profiles and pages and often if there is incorrect information it will get fixed because the people who run the website really care about free open knowledge. If you don’t wanna cite wiki that’s fine, those articles also have sources and citations of their own so look at those to see where the people who wrote the wiki article got their info from.
-Go a few pages in on a google search, the first few results that come up often have bought their place on with ads and clickbait so do a bit of time digging to find more sources rather than the first one you see.
-E-mail your lecturers and ask for help and tools, often they’ll already have the stuff you’re looking for but forgot they knew about it. Sadly they might be a prick and refuse to give you these tools cause they’re ‘old school’ ie, think they’re better than you , if so then go on twitter and ask, online academics are always happy to help and share information with people passionate about their subjects.
Online Courses, tutorials or archives that cover loads of topics:
- https://www.khanacademy.org/ : Khan academy is great and IT’S FREE!! It may look like its only really for high school kids but I still use it for going back over small topics I need a refresher on , it covers soooo much and is extremely easy to use and gives you step by step guides on how to solve problems or answer questions!
- https://www.w3schools.com/ : W3 is programming, I started using it when I was 13 so it’s super easy and clear to use. It’ll help with most languages used in college courses.
- https://archive.org/ : This is a huge open access online repository of millions of historical and modern books, images and software. If you need something it will probably be here or it will have something that can link you to where you need to go!
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ : Shit tons of out of copyright books for free online, I’d say a lot of the texts your lecturers make you buy will be here for free and its there’s loads of free books to read while you’re bored at home!
- https://libgen.is/ : This website totally does not have most of your college text books for free, absolutely doesn’t. If you type in the name of your textbook it totally wont show up the dated versions of it to download.
MindMapping: (mindmapping is handy to visualise you’re work when you’re home or for taking notes so you don’t get sidetracked the blue part of the list was made my Dr. Mike Cosgrave of UCC (My Dad))
Freemind (Links to an external site.) is old now, but still excellent, and totally free and open source. It exports to images as well as several text formats. It only works on desktop PCs – Windows or Mac, and requires Java. Updates are not as frequent now, so it may become less usable on recent versions of the OS.
Xmind (Links to an external site.) has excellent free versions for Windows, Mac and IOs, As with Freemind, I’ve used it comfortably for years.
Simplemind (Links to an external site.) has free versions, but they are not as feature rich as Freemind or the free version of XMind – exporting can be a bit less intuitive. On mobile devices, Share as Image works well. It works on Windows, Mac, IOS and Android, so it allows me to access my mind maps on any device.
ESSAY TOOLS : (some of these you probably already know about but there’s no harm in listing them)
- https://www.grammarly.com/ : This is a chrome extension and can help with grammar and spelling, mine is using american spelling so it keeps making me use z’s in words that don’t have them but go off sis.
- https://www.zotero.org/ : You’re lecturers have been doing you wrong if they haven’t shown you this for essays, this is also a chrome extension with a desktop component that saves your sources and will just create you a bibliography automatically and can link into your google drive and do all that referencing shit for you. it is magic my dudes. There’s loads of youtube tutorials on how to use it so have a look at it.
- https://scholar.google.com/ : Google scholar filters out random crap from your search and will only give you proper academic articles to use and reference, a lot of them are on the authors blogs so they’re free to use, its a case of trial and error.
- https://www.jstor.org : Right so with JSTOR you can do 6 articles for free online without a college link but most of the time you can log in through your college library website so you can access it at home. It also has a button called ‘cite this for me’ so it’ll just grab all the info you need from the piece to cite it in your paper.
- https://tagpacker.com : So tbh I only just found this but it looks like a good idea in theory, apparently the software is a touch buggy but most startups are really, so this will save different collections of links for you to either look back on or to share and go look at all these cool articles relating to this topic I’ve already found and bookmarked.
- http://tapor.ca/home : TAPoR is a super handy website that has complied loads of tools for studying texts and analysing them. I think the layout, although pretty, is kinda confusing but it has some amazingly handy tools there that you wouldn’t find else where easily.
- https://voyant-tools.org/ : So my Dad and my lecturer Shawn both use this to create cool visualisations or text analysis, it’s a super easy tool where you upload a text and it will analyse the different components such and word repetition and usage. Its got a really nice UI and gives out nice exports for use in essays and whatnot.
NOTE SHARING:
Y’all need to be helping each other and sharing what you can, some students might not be able to take notes for their online lectures for some reason, might be wifi or they might be sick ,who knows. Pull up and help your friends
- https://www.google.com/drive/ : share documents between your mates, one thing I do during a class is to share a document between all of your friends and each person take a page and takes notes during the class and then if anyone missed something you and your friends all have loads of different versions of the same class which can be handy for seeing different viewpoints.
- https://www.camscanner.com/ : Camscanner is an app that turns your phone camera into a scanner so you can scan hand written notes or diagrams and have them come out really clear so you can share them, use it and out the images in a shared google drive folder or in your course groupchat (if you don’t have one then make one its super handy to ask questions just make sure it doesn’t get messy and mean)
- https://keep.google.com : Google Keep does shared notes online, so you can do lists, written notes, images, documents and some other stuff, idno, I use it for my grocery list with my roommates tbh cause we can all add or remove things from the list and everyone’s list get updated. But it works for all kind of notes and will be handy for group work as well.
- https://clickup.com/blog/note-taking-apps/ : Here’s and articles I found that has a bunch of free one’s you can use and it lists some pros and cons to each of them.
PRESENTATION TOOLS: ( this is to make your presentations all cool and graphically pretty)
- https://www.canva.com/ : I use Canva to make presentations and online posters for society events in college, its free and once you spend 20 minutes using it its easy to get around. You can use it to jazz up a presentation or paper, I’ve used it to make a cool CV for summer jobs. It really does hellp your grade when you can use a cool tool to help visualise your idea but also give your lecturer something interesting to look at when they’re correcting 200 essays that all look the same.
- https://prezi.com/ : (paywalled) (it costs money so I don’t use it but some people swear by it) Prezi allows you to really easily animate your presentations and make interesting shapes and visual connections. its cool and funky and easy to use once you spend a little bit of time playing around on it.
- https://www.emaze.com : This is another handy presentation tool to make cool and pretty ppts. There’s no harm in making a pretty ppt seeing as the rest of your class will most likely just use the pre-installed google slides templates and animations so jazz it up and have fun with your work.
- https://flourish.studio/ : Flourish is an amazing way making really cool visualisations of your data, you can create timelines of animations to represent your work and embed them easily into websites and presentations.
SOME REALLY COOL ONLINE PROJECTS AND WEBSITES THAT, WHO KNOWS, MIGHT HELP YOU WITH A THING:
(A lot of these are from my lecturers so I’ll colour code them to give credit)
- https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/projects/ : My lecturer Shawn showed us this website, I thought it was awesome and a great way to visualise knowledge and give you some inventive ideas.
GROUP DISCUSSION PLATFORMS AND VIDEO PLATFORMS:
- https://gsuite.google.com/products/meet/ : I’m pretty sure this is the right link for google hangouts, don’t forget if you have a gmail or college email you have a google suite so you can use all these tools they already have available for free. Hangouts is handy and can take a good number of people on a group call for study work or for whatever, even for you and your mates to have bants.
- https://zoom.us : Lots of lecturers have been using Zoom for their classes which is great and you can also just use it for free without having to go through college so that can work for study groups, the one problem is that in the free package you can only have max 40 min meetings but an unlimited number of them so that’s up to your discretion.
- https://www.skype.com/en/ : Don’t forget our old buddy Skype, it works really well in app form for those of us who don’t have a laptop/desktop, one thing I remember from the app was that it drains your battery so just remember to be plugged in when using it or have a power bank.
- Netflix Party : this is a chrome attachment, I added it for fun so you and your friends can stream netflix together to take a break from study or if you have to watch a movie for an assignment, you can also chat at the same time on a sidebar, so nifty!
ONLINE LIBRARY AND MUSEUM RESOURCES!!!!!!
Most libraries and museums have online collections, archives and digital documents. There might even be a national one that will be available to only specific regions but more often than not, they’re free! I’m going to add as many as I can find now and as people send me more I’ll update the list!
- https://archive-it.org/home/nli : This is the national library of Ireland digital archive, it is free, use it. It has links to relevant websites and digitised documents from the national archives to use as references for projects!
- https://artsandculture.google.com/ : There’s a bunch of virtual museum tours or exhibition tours on here, they’re high quality and free, use them!
- https://www.dri.ie/ : the digital repository of Ireland , This ain’t the easiest to navigate, imo, but it’s got loads or historical and cultural Irish documents. use it and appreciate the work put into it!
PODCASTS:
There are podcasts for everything out there, just cause it’s not on spotify doesn’t mean it’s not there, I’ll list a few websites that host academic podcasts below to get you started. Also a lot of the time you can just throw a podcast on in the background and listen to it without even realising all the information your brain in taking in, it’s a great way to learn without feeling like you’re learning.
- https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/ : The archaeology podcast network is a great website with loads of different shows relating to, you guessed it, archaeology, I don’t even do archaeology but this is a really cool website and will be handy to get you started on your search for academic podcasts.
- https://www.exordo.com/blog/the-best-academic-podcasts-you-probably-havent-heard-of/ : This is just a list of cool ones, but its a wide range and will help with those in different fields of study.
- https://www.ieltspodcast.com/ : This one is coll although it looks likes to get some of the information you have to pay but there is a lot of free resources on there for academic writing, work interviews and general academic improvement.
- https://collegeinfogeek.com/best-podcasts/ : Here’s a good list that has it in categories of different fields of study. One thing I forgot to say above was TED talks, those are the best thing in the world for good solid information and will give you links to really interesting papers and pages.
PREMADE RESOURCE LISTS MADE BY OTHER PEOPLE:
- http://www.dublincity.ie/library-eresources : Dublin city council made this list so go them. There’s a bunch of free stuff on here to use, a lot of the require you to have a Dublin library card. This is a bit of a pain, but for those who have one make use of these resources!
- https://www.doaj.org/ : Directory of open access journals, you know what that means, THEY’RE FREE!! This is not the prettiest UI but it is easy enough to use and will make your life easier when looking for stuff.
- http://tapor.ca/home : TAPoR is a super handy website that has complied loads of tools for studying texts and analysing them. (this is also in the essay section but I put it here too in case people skipped it)
- Alan Liu’s DH Tool site : Once again shown to me by my lecturer Shawn, this is a compiled site of loads of digital humanities work tools but tbh anyone could use these, seeing as they’re DH they’re most likely all open access(free) and made with the user in mind. There’s tons of cool things on here from animation tools to archaeology tools.
