The following 5 have been picked because they’re being used by fellow Student Affairs professionals; because they’re free; and because they’ve saved those people time and money – which is important in these (still) recessionary times! Some of the recommended tools may seem pretty basic to those of you who have come to the blog via Twitter, Linkedin or other futuristic social media outlets! But in January I delivered a Social Media workshop to colleagues and was taken aback by the number of people who didn’t even have a gmail account.
Anyhow – here’s my Top 5!
Doodle.com – Working in a multi-site campus (39 sites at the last count), with staff scattered across the city, there was a time when there were three options for scheduling a meeting - phoning all participants multiple times to get a consensus; e-mailing them with options and collating the results; or taking the totalitarian approach and unilaterally naming a time and venue and hoping enough people could make it. Now Doodle has made scheduling meetings a doddle.
Dropbox.com – Possibly soon to be overtaken by the all powerful Apple and their iCloud, but for the moment Dropbox rules in the area of document sharing and synchronising files between devices.
Teamer.net – Originally developed to organise and communicate easily with sports teams, Teamer is now being used by student societies, pastoral support groups, peer mentoring teams, chaplaincy teams, and anybody that has to organise groups on a regular basis.
Website polls – Too many to mention – but snappoll, polldaddy, booroo and freepollkit are all used by colleagues. A great way to get instant feedback from students on any subject; to get some stats on the rapidly changing student population; or to monitor changes over time on important stats like part-time work. Booroo lets you set quiz questions, which is a fun way to test how much your students know about your services. Unfortunately the sampling technique usually isn’t rigorous enough to give 100% confidence in the answers, but it’s a great indication of the way things are looking.
Google Docs, Google Calendars, Google Maps, Google Everything! Four years ago our services were investing money in software that could allow them to share calendars and make bookings remotely. Now staff can put appointments in from their smartphone, and send the students a link with the exact location of their office. I’m pretty sure we’re not using a fraction of the functionality that’s available from Google!
Well that’s my top 5, as I said, we’re just scratching the surface on useful web tools, and I’d love to hear other suggestions, critiques, or just comments in general!
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