Digital Fluency Intensive Week 2

Week 2

Today was as fast paced as last week and I would have felt overwhelmed if I had not been introduced  to  many of these tools by colleagues and Tania at CORE Education who Manaiakalani facilitated  one on one tutorials through Google Hangouts last year.

Having some prior knowledge was helpful as I was able to reinforce my learning by helping teach my DFI classmates and trouble shoot. There were of course many functions and settings I was completely unaware of... 

Tab Control

People, including students often comment on the ridiculous amounts of tabs I have open. My memory is not great and I'm very visual so I up until very recently I have used tabs to remind me of what tasks need to be worked on.

I really like shortcuts like  Command>Shift>#  and Command>Option> arrow keys for skipping back and forth along tabs but these extensions are far kinder on the computer!

                                                
 This extension looks quite simple and at first go looks easier than search history to find closed tabs. I will be interested how often I end up using it.

Toby Mini

A colleague introduced me to this extension a few weeks ago and it has been incredible! It is a very visual way of organising and remembering which tabs relate to a certain task. 

Previously I had done this through having up to five windows with multiple tabs open in them. Toby mini lets you sort your tabs, name the session,  then close them all ready to open up next time you need to work on that project. Working with many classes and EOTC projects, this is a very helpful way of streamlining workflow while decluttering and speeding up my machine.   

Gmail
I found the information about customising gmail really helpful. I have recently been encouraged to archive read emails before than deleting them or letting them sit. 

Psychologically I find this quite difficult as I've always thought of email as out of sight being out of mind. However using the label system is reassuring and if I don't have reason to  label an irrelevant email I still have the satisfaction of deleting them :)

I'd like to explore the settings and labels more in Gmail especially colour-coding them to match my drive folders. I plan to archive all emails previous to this term. 

Google hangout calls
We used Google Calendar to organise google hangouts  with more than person. This is a feature I have used before one-to-one and find helpful  to use alongside shared google docs. With more than one person you need to be aware of keeping turning microphones off and on.

The 'infinity mirror'  effect is definitely the best feature of google hangouts!   

Quicktime 
The Mac video and recording app was used to record the google hangout with screensharing. The following is an example of me not recording the other participants :/ I am learning from my mistakes :)