Online Tools for my Students. Part I- the 3rd Edition.

Well,  it was time again to update a list of online tools I rely on. The second part will not be edited again as it was a collection of tools links I have found during my never ending web surfs and did not actually try most of them….and I hopefully I will post the 3rd part soon since i have already a huge amount of links collected since the last part published… 

Online Tools for my Students. The 3rd Edition

1. A Gmail account. Gmail. All Google Applications require a Gmail account. I wonder why you don’t have one already… Not all google products are good – in fact i have become a bit anxious of Google being a new Microsoft- but i find this email service as one of the best and helps log into many Google services you need…

2. Google Docs. Speaking of google services….It is a great tool to produce collaborative work. It has Forms -also used for online polling , Powerpoint etc… In fact, Google Docs actually killed my need for Open Office… and as of May 2012, Google moves into cloud busienss and we have Google Drive….

3. Speaking of Open Office. In case you are pissed off with Microsoft Office. You can download this Office software which is free. Not as good as Microsoft Office yet but it is still satisfactory. In fact, I was also recommended Libreoffice but i could not try it yet..[I have just begun to try, similar to Open Office, so far so good though] .As I said above Google Docs are killing these services… As i had written before ?But I am increasingly annoyed with it. Unfortunately new Microsoft Word rocks and I have to go back. Open Office people should work harder.?

4. Google Reader. An excellent tool to follow blogs and sites through RSS feeds. I follow more than 500 at the moment and Reader is just great…

5. A blogging software: Blogger or WordPress.com or Tumblr… I definitely vote for WordPress with its Inbuilt statistics, better templates, being open source, is best for more dense production.. in the mean time, Blogger has also become better…

6. For WordPress themes, I relied on two sources: Premium WP Themes and Best WordPress Themes

7. And WordPress Plugins of course. Without Plugins, a WordPress theme/template is incomplete. You can find many plugins listings such as this one. My favorite ones (in Alphabetical order): Akismet, Blackbird Pie, Broken Link Checker, Facebook comments for WordPress, FBLike, GD Star Rating, Jetpack by WordPress.com, Network Publisher, Social Metrics, Most Commented Widget, Subscribe To Comments, Top Commentators Widget, Wikio Buttons, WordPress.com Popular Posts, WordPress.com Stats, WP Google-buzz, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

8. For file storage and sharing, in addition to Google Docs, I use Box.com. But of course these are mostly for textual material. I don?t actually store much on non-textual, audio-visual material yet. Of course Scribd is also good but I happen to continue with Box.com mostly. However, for social reading and sharing, I upload long blog posts to Scribd eventually.

9. For microblogging: Twitter, Google Plus and Friendfeed. Since last time, I have become an active Twitter user. Although not promising too much yet I kind of like Google Plus and share stuff there. And Friendfeed is particularly popular in Turkey and intelligible discussion among netizens occur in this platform. I am not an active user there but i observe the flow…

10. Tweet Deck. Saved my life. I could not figure out how to use Twitter at the outset more effectively and thanks to this service I got used to it. Twitter bought Tweetdeck and integrated some of its functionalities to Twitter itself but this service is still very useful. [However, after being bought by Twitter, I began to have some doubts]

11. Paint.Net. A free image editor. That’s the one I use constantly. Some recommend GIMP but I haven’t tested that at all. Let me know if you recommend, too.

12. Bibme. A free, simple place to create your bibliographies in several Biblio formats. Honestly, I used this to create my bibliography for my dissertation. I still believe it is the most practical (they have finally added a function to refer to book chapters). Despite all the good buzz, I could not use Zotero so far…

13. Youtube. There are many rivals but I still use Youtube. More and more liking its Recommendations… Its recent redesign also helps. And of course for video hosting it is still a great place… I have signed up for Vimeo, too, though. (Mashable?s Video Toolbox. Ultimate source for Video sharing related site lists.) It is a good host for more artsy and professional stuff.

14. Speaking of recommendations, LastFm is a great music place to find new good musical stuff. Not for downloading but exploration…for music recommendations then comes amazon.com getglue

15. Speaking of recommendations, in book recommendations Amazon, my beloved, provides a great service. However, my number one is goodreads. In the third place, I check out getglue.

16. Speaking of recommendations, in movie recommendations, can there be a rival to IMDB, as the best film database? No rivals. But Criticker has become my main site for movie recommendations. Then comes amazon.com and getglue. I realize that IMDB offers more friendly recommendations recently. I might look into it…

17. In finding new TV shows to watch, of course the best is to ask your peers but still  amazon.com and getglue are good sources.

18. For music downloads/sharing. I like to use SoulSeek. I increasingly relied on torrents using BitTorrent software such as the legendary The Pirate Bay or more practically isohunt. However, after the Megaupload case, we have some difficulties on this…

19. For a region free open source DVD player software, I use VLC Media Player. Well, I have betrayed. Now I use GOM player

20. For a music player, WinAmp has always been my favorite.

21. Do I have to mention Wikipedia. A basic source of knowledge and good to give links to when you write about some stuff your readers may not know…

22. For wiki-based work, I use from time to time Wikispaces. User friendly wiki software.

23. Best social bookmarking site for me was Delicious. Then I moved to Google Bookmarks. A terrible alternative after Delicious. Now I totally rely on Diigo.

24. Google Alerts is good to follow incoming news etc. I use it to follow anthropology, Bilgi University, besiktas, Orhan Pamuk etc related news to follow. You can follow the alerts thru your email or RSS readers. But it is not limited to news. Good tool.

25. In case you want to read some stuff later then here you have InstaPaper. There is a bookmarklet so that when you surf, you can easily mark stuff to read later. I now actively use it. I dowload the stuff as a PDF or ebup file and read at my e-reader.

26. Instant messaging (IM). I was not much into it but Skype still rules. In fact with the Facebook integration I realized I began to use Skype more. It is also good for internation interviews. Google chat/talk became my main IM and I have totally quitted MSN Messenger. and Facebook chat is also interesting but in the last analysis, I am not an IM person.

Since the last edition, some of my new toys include:
27. Klout. Among many possible alternatives, Klout seems to be the best tool measure your Twitter performance/impact. Speaking of Twitter, I use who.unfollowed.me to track who unfollows me or who doesn?t follow me back. Well, this is a depressing tool in fact, it is never good to see who unfollowed you:)

28. For social networks, no need to mention Facebook. In the mean time, there are smaller and more niche like networks such as Glue , Academia or LinkedIn

29. Probably the greatest buzz since the last edition is Pinterest. I started to use it as a visual archive for my blog posts but it is more than that now…

30. Another major attraction for me was Storify. An excellent tool to gather images and messages from social media, particularly Twitter, in order to produce social media based stories. It needs to be more user-friendly but still very useful in its current form.

31. Finally, there is the calibre, to deal with various e-book formats. It is an open source tool to convert between different e-book formats.

And more to mention:
32. InfraRecorder. An open source cd burner. That’s what I used to use before I switched to a USB based music player in my car.

33. In order to bypass Web Censorship in Turkey… well, I need to work on this, but for the moment, I rely on Open DNS which worked fine so far… I had used Google Public DNS for a while, but because of Google?s own problems in Turkey, that did not work too smoothly and I switched back to Open DNS.

34. Our lovely Library.nu is gone and there are a few alternatives not as good as Library.nu yet:
http://en.bookfi.org/
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks
http://www.libgen.info/
http://lib.org.by/
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

35. In addition to networking, I use Facebook for sharing links and storing my photos online. I could never like much Picasa or Flickr. But these are huge photo storage and sharing places out there… In case you need…

36. Some like Mendeley as an academic resource, but I still could not try it much…

37. Firefox used to be my favorite browser. I have become a  Chrome user but again recently Chrome begins to fail and I switch back to Firefox frequently…

38. I used to use  Doodle for event organizations. Decision making about time especially. But now I mostly rely on Facebook Questions in order to find out the best time and Facebook Events for event organizations…Some other organizational tools via Kevin Bondelli: Google Calendar ? Evernote HassleMe  I totally rely on Google Calendar for personal use, by the way…

39. A few tools I have long forgotten to use:
Twitter toys: TweetLevel (A unique tool created by Edelman – measures an individual’s importance on Twitter)- The Twitter Tim.es (The Twitter Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account)
Bubbl.us. Might be good for collective brainstorming.
Wordle. For calculating word, term frequency in a site…

40. Some other online storage sites: Dropbox, Keep and Share, 4shared, SlideShare (particularly for PowerPoint presentations), Issuu
41. Zamzar ? an online file conversion tool.
42. Analytics tools: Google Analytics and Feedburner, I use.
43. PodBean, PodOmatic and many more at Mashable?s Podcasting Toolbox for podcasting tools.

But of course there comes the mobile revolution!
I am pro-android and with Samsung Galaxy S II, here are a list of apps I love to use:
Twitter
Wikipedia
IMDb Movies & TV
GetGlue
Compass
Foursquare
Google Reader
Box
Facebook for Android
Instagram
Google Drive
WordPress
Google Search
Booking.com
Google Maps
IETT Otobüs Saatleri
Hell yeah, for the first time, I do work out due to:
Push Ups
Sit Ups
Squat

 


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