PicCollage - the twelfth app of Christmas

What a great app to finish with! PicCollage is really easy to use and does what it says on the tin - it makes collages.

Merry Christmas from UEA Library!

Flipboard - the eleventh app of Christmas

Well the penultimate app is Flipboard, which I am predisposed to dislike as it is one of the apps that came pre-loaded on my phone and which I cannot delete. This annoys me. 

Flipboard is yet another curation tool, and one I don't like very much. As far as curation goes, I think I prefer the idea of Pocket, where you collect as you go. Flipboard pulls everything into one place, which I can see the benefit of, but I quite like going into individual apps like Twitter and Facebook, both for a sense of orientation - being in a particular app for a particular purpose - but also because if I then want to do something more all the functionality of that app is available to me. Maybe I'm a dinosaur in this respect. I don't know! 

#12appsDIT consider Flipboard to be useful for it's sharing and collaborative functions. You can share articles with people in your network, and you can create public 'magazines', so you can see what other people have curated. I can see how this might work, although setting up Flipboard takes a little while, and it has a very personal feel about it. It also seems very similar to Pinterest...and indeed there are plenty of articles like this one comparing the two. Ultimately, getting people to follow each other and set up magazines might be great fun, but will it be a learning experience? 

I'm also conscious that I now have app fatigue after going through the 12 apps of Christmas, and am tired of setting up new accounts, linking together services that want access to all my data, finding that they don't quite work in the way I would like to use them, and falling back into my old ways because I preferred them. How much of this is because the new tools don't beat the old ones, or because I'm stuck in my ways I don't know. Maybe I will give Flipboard another go someday, but for now, it's back to ignoring it's continual presence on my phone. 

Photomath - the tenth app of Christmas

Oh maths...I'm not useless at maths, but I really don't have any need of complex equations in my job. As long as I know which equations are in which excel boxes I'm pretty much ok, which means I am not in need of any of today's apps, either for teaching or my own learning.

However, I think they all sound pretty cool and useful, so here they are in case you'd like to use them!
PhotoMath will use your phone's camera to give you the answer to any printed problem (well, they are still working on the really complex ones). It also shows you the working out, which is neat.
MyScript Calculator lets you write equations on the screen and will then solve them.
Desmos is a graphing tool which I in no way understand but I can make it create fairly pretty patterns. Desmos is available using a browser as well so you just need to go to the site to get started.

Enjoy your mathematics my friends!

Cogi (and Pinterest) - the ninth app(s) of Christmas

Yes, I have failed again and this post is a day late. Partly this is because the ninth app of Christmas is actually two apps - Cogi and Pinterest.

Cogi is a voice recorder. I can understand why being able to record audio would be extremely useful for teaching and learning, and a good app to do this would be invaluable. I'm not sure about Cogi's passive recording function though - this enables you to press record and capture up to 45 seconds of audio you just missed. My instant thoughts are - 'how would you make this work ethically? I don't really want to be passively recorded!' I then go to download the app and this is another that requires access to pretty much all my phone information, so I don't download it. If I need a voice recorder I will remember it and maybe give it a try then.

Pinterest on the other hand, that's something of a little more interest to me. You can use it to discover, 'pin' and share images from within Pinterest and around the web. I signed up to Pinterest years ago when I first discovered it, made a lovely board about librarians, and then promptly forgot about it completely. Like most social media things (mainly Facebook) I'm actually not that good at saving and sharing things of interest, so Pinterest probably isn't for me personally. On the other hand, it is a great way of sharing ideas in a 'mood board' style and I think it could be a great deal of fun in a teaching environment. It has also been used effectively
in other ways like these gorgeous boards from the British Library:



My conclusion? I should probably give it more of a go, find a few friends on there and see what other people are sharing. I expect I'll find it more useful if I actually engage with the sharing functions rather than just using it quite literally as my own personal pinboard...

StudyBlue - the eighth app of Christmas

I don't know what to make of StudyBlue. My initial impressions are that most apps feel a lot more subtle about trying to sell you the upgraded version. StudyBlue is making me feel like I can't access anything useful without paying from the word go. This is because I am browsing around trying to figure out how this thing works.
I give up and start making some cards as I guess I was expected to do first. It wants me to suggest a term, so I pick 'database', and then StudyBlue shows me how other people have defined database on their cards. Suddenly this is fascinating! Quite a lot of answers are fairly accurate, but some aren't, which is a bit worrying.
Next I try 'academic journal' - again levels of granularity in the responses are quite varied.
So I decide to be brave and try 'librarian', who is apparently a 'person who can help you find books or another source of information'...well, that's not so bad I suppose!
Ok, my library obsession aside, this is starting to make some more sense to me. I can see some people have used these cards to note how to reference different types of information which seems like a sensible idea.
I wonder if this could be used for some library matching card games as well.
However, for my personal learning style I don't like it at all, this is not the way I study! But this in itself is useful to contemplate, as this obviously does work well for many people, so at the very least knowing the app exists to be able to signpost people to it is pretty useful. Here are my cards so far...

RefMe - the seventh app of Christmas

Today's app is really easy to write about, as it's one I already know and love. RefME is simply fantastic for collecting references. It's so very easy - you can use a web clipper in your browser, you can search by title, author, or ISBN from within the service quickly and easily, or you can scan the barcode on the book! For undergraduates, this is so much easier than exporting references in RIS format from whichever database they are in (and they're not usually in a database, they're usually on Amazon...or Wikipedia...) It's even easier than having to change your settings in Google Scholar to the correct reference management software.

In short, I love it, and I use it myself.

The only issue with RefME is that is doesn't currently have a cite-while-you-write component, although you can generate a perfect reference list and the layout of your citations is shown for you as well. To my mind this makes this more of an undergraduate resource, where you might not be handling too many references per assignment. On the other hand, you can export out to Mendeley, Endnote etc. so you could then use these services for cite-while-you-write if you so wished.

One final really cool thing about RefME is that they accept individual institution referencing styles and include them in their service. So if your institution has an agreement with RefME, you may very well find the correct style is already pre-loaded and ready for you to use.

IF, DO and MindMeister - the fifth and sixth apps of Christmas

Trello and Pocket - the third and fourth apps of Christmas

Yes, you caught me, I did fail to post yesterday, so it's time for a double whammy today.

Yesterday's app was Trello, which has been introduced to me before as we used it for our Discovery Service implementation project here at UEA. I really quite liked it! I think it's probably an excellent way for teams to work together, divide up tasks and measure progress. As a personal tool it's probably very useful as well, although perhaps could also lead to a lot of procrastination trying to organise your work rather than actually getting on and doing it (as shown by the below where I've organised today's to do list into a Trello board...this was entirely unnecessary, but fun!) Trello certainly isn't going to replace Wunderlist for me, which I use to manage my life pretty much, but then I've always been very fond of lists.

Pocket is something brand new to me and initially sounds fantastic. I am the kind of person who emails links to myself to look at later, and then never get around to it. I'm also very good at downloading PDFs, convinced that this time I WILL find time to read them, and yep, you've guessed it, years later they're still sitting there, unread and lonely.

So I download Pocket onto my phone, and quickly and easily I Pocket a tweet. Then it gets a bit harder - I have to remember that the share function is in the menu settings rather than via the site/s itself. This take a while to figure out. I give up on my phone and install the extension into my browser and try and bookmark a journal article. This is fine, but because of the need to authenticate to access full text I'm not seeing that on Pocket. I'm starting to think this is a bit more trouble that it's worth.

But there are features of Pocket I really like the sound of - offline reading for some items, instant access across all devices, sharing functions, read out loud - they all sound fantastic. I'm just not sure this is really for me (see above, I'm a list person, I'm happy with a list!)

The premise of Pocket I rather like: instead of having email links here and there, PDFs saved in multiple locations, oodles of bookmarks, I can instead keep all these exciting things in one place...but that really doesn't resolve the whole 'then read them' issue. In fact, Pocket is highly likely to increase my sense of satisfaction that I've collected together a good and valuable reading list, thereby decreasing my actual desire to get on with the reading itself. I wonder if many students would experience the same?

The other thing about Pocket is that for my students, gathering isn't enough, they also want the software to spit out references as well. And do I quite frankly. So something like RefME with it's webclipper is actually my preferred way of 'pocketing' my reading. That way I'm saving my reading all in one list as I browse around the web AND I'm creating my reference list at the same time. Of course RefMe doesn't contain the actual documents, so it doesn't have and sharing features but for academic learning it seems more appropriate to me.

Pocket's use of the 'share' function to Pocket from apps is new to me and clever. But ultimately the browser extension for web clipping is something a whole host of other apps can do, and really this is just another one. Might be perfect for some people I guess. But I think I'm happy with the way I do things. After all, I don't need MORE articles stored up to read at some point...honest...

OfficeLens - the second app of Christmas

 Hummm, but do I love OfficeLens? Today's app is essentially a capture service that lets you use your camera to send pictures straight to OneNote, OneDrive or your phone gallery.

I've never actually been big on using my phone to take pictures of slides/whiteboards etc. although I've given many presentations where students were continually taking pictures of the screen. I even showed someone how to look up a book on the library catalogue the other day, and his way of making a note of the shelfmark was to photograph it. This is all very alien to me, except of course last week we made a list of things to do on the whiteboard during a meeting and I took a picture of it afterwards! So whether I like it or not this certainly is a useful service.

Do I love it though? Well, I certainly like the fact that you can send the picture instantly to your OneNote. This definitely increases the chances of someone actually remembering they had taken a picture and of looking at it again in the future. I do often wonder about all those students taking photo after photo of my slides - are they really going to look at them again? Will they remember how or why they were useful?

But ultimately the camera on my phone is probably good enough for my needs...and also the amount of information Microsoft want from you when you install this app is massive. Why exactly does OfficeLens need to know my caller ID and phone information? If this is for texting photos, then I think I'd prefer to use the camera on my phone thank you. 

Will I use OfficeLens for teaching....probably not. Getting students to use Microsoft 365 is hard enough but when they've all got a camera and are used to snapping away, why would they want another app? 

Work confidence: talk that talk and walk that walk!

I like job interviews. I'm sure most people think I'm pretty weird for saying that, but I've done so many of them that I think my view and attitude toward them has changed from terror and insecurity to...well... understanding that an interview is actually more of a conversation - and it's just as important for the interviewee to engage with the interviewers, ask questions and get to know their ethos as it is for them to get to know the interviewee.

Job applications though...I hate them with a fiery passion. They take so long to write for one thing! For another they make you spend hours thinking about yourself and bigging yourself up, and that can be exhausting and difficult for a lot of people, me included. So I do agree with the idea that knowing your strengths and capitalising on them is a great way to start tackling job applications!

For me, I know that working with people is an extremely important part of my working life. I like to be a part of a team, I like to be able to share and discuss ideas, and I get de-motivated and tired if I work in isolation and silence for any long period of time. I know that I need to work in a role that adds value to the experience of others, so I know that when I'm working with students I can make a real difference to their studies and their experience of university. I find this very motivating and it also helps me isolate the areas of my job I most enjoy, which can really help me get through the other elements I enjoy less (administration for example). I know that I'm good at organisation and management which explains how I manage to pack so much into my weekends!

I dislike sleep deprivation, confrontation and negotiation  This means I have to make sure I work a job with manageable hours, don't exhaust myself in my free time, work in an environment in which I am comfortable and get on with most of the people around me, and remember to ask for help in situations where I feel I need a little reassurance, or a second voice on my side. I also dislike starting anything from scratch if I don't have to, so I always use an old job application, or the notes from my previous job interview to help me prepare and give me a basis to work from. This is my top tip really when it comes to interview preparation - reflect on your last job interview and how you think it went - what did they ask you and what were your answers? How would you answer them now? I always make sure I have the answer to why I want the job, what I think I can bring to the role and where I would like to being 5 years time, because I know they're going to ask me those things. Plus, if you've taken the time to think through those answers, you'll be able to relate those practically to the job opportunity you have in front of you, making your answers to the interview panel more thoughtful and engaging and making the whole experience more useful for you in deciding whether this job actually will take you where you want to be.

This 'thing' is intended as an opportunity to refresh my existing 'CV database', add-in any activities or interests I've not previously included or thought to use in a job-seeking context, and generally keep my bank of 'things I've done and can use again' up-to-date, so when I come to writing my next job application I'm not scratching around in my memory trying to dig up examples that demonstrate my ability. I did this in July when I applied for (and got) my new job, and interestingly, even though I know I've achieved a lot that is CV worthy, I am struggling to write them down here to share with the CPD23 community because it feels like boasting. Isn't that odd? Clearly being enthusiastic about my achievements is difficult to do at all times, not just when I'm staring at a job application asking myself if it's all really worth it. What this tells me is that, even if you're not comfortable talking about yourself in everyday life and struggle to believe in your achievements, putting it all together for a job interview is not the same thing - and you can learn to turn on that confidence, look at a job description and tell yourself you can do it, and then walk into the interview just as yourself, and tell the truth: you can do this job. It might be a version of yourself most people will never see, but it's the version of yourself that will make the panel sit up and take notice. Trust me.