5 Tools for Online Education
Jan 18, 2017 · 2 min read
I recently completed a Masters in Strategic Communications from Johns Hopkins University. I did this while continuing my career and starting a family. All of my courses were online — causing me to build out a significant set of tools for doing grad school virtually. To read about why I chose to complete a degree online check out this article, The Future of Education — 6 Reasons that Online Students have an Advantage in the Modern Workforce.
- Organizing Research — Mendeley allows you to easily organize, annotate, and highlight PDFs. This works especially well for reading on a tablet and then being able to see your notes on your computer.
- Organizing Web Documents — Annotary. If you find yourself needing to read and markup webpages (using non-scholarly sources or current events) Annotary lets you save, categorize, and annotate web pages — it includes a social share function which could be good for group work as well.
- Group Projects — appear.in is a very simple group communication tool. No one needs a user name and log in — so you don’t have to deal with people “not having a gmail or skype account” which every group seems to have that one.
- Online Research — Google Scholar — Here is a tutorial from NYU on setting it up so that it highlights the documents that your library has accessible. It is NYU’s guide but it can work for whatever school you are studying at.
- Style Check — Hemingway App copy and paste your text in, it checks your style — helping you to identify complicated sentences or unclear points.
What did I miss? Do you have other tools that have been helpful?
