Organisational Tools

There are a number of tools available which can help with work. Many of these are particularly useful for collaborative projects, which may include colleagues from other institutions. Here are a few of the E-learning Team's favourites:

• Meet-o-matic: http://www.meetomatic.com/ Particularly useful for organising meetings with staff who don't use shared Outlook calendars or staff from other institutions. All you have to do is set up a selection of dates in meet-o-matic and then circulate an email with a link to your meet-o-matic page. People select the dates they can attend and meet-o-matic tells you the best date. Saves circulating hundreds of emails ... hurrah!
• Google Docs - http://docs.google.com/ Access to online document editing and sharing. Google Documents allows you to create word documents, PDF files etc online. They are also saved to your own Web-based file space giving you both read and edit access at any location. Files can also be shared with others for collaborative working. You can also created spreadsheets and presentations.
• Wordle - http://www.wordle.net/ Create Word clouds from any piece of text (see Wikipedia for a definition of Word clouds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud). They can be used to good effect to show the concepts within a piece of writing.

Next steps

Explore some of the tools listed above and see what they can do for you. Have a look at the 'tours' of the products to get some ideas about how and when you may want to use them.

Your thoughts

Let us know what you think about online organisational tools by commenting on this post. Some questions to get you started:

• Which was your favourite tool?
• Do you think you would use these for work/personal use?
• Do you have any suggestions to add to the list?