Favorite Tools

Okay. This week I am getting a little personal here. I had the dubious opportunity to find out what it is like to live without the use of one of my fingers. My left little finger, or “pinky,” is now my left littler finger. So, as I go through very ordinary tasks, everything is just a little, (pun intended,) harder to accomplish. Life without my favorite tech tools would be just like living without the use of my littler finger; I could do it all, but it just wouldn’t be as fun or as easy!
Take Microsoft Windows, for instance. It is so inherently part of all my computing that I almost forgot to list it! It even is working right now to provide my capital letters b/c it is too painful to hit the shift key with my littler friend. It has so many features, that I continue to learn new ones within the Office suite of tools as I explore.
As for keeping up with folks in my many faceted educational life, I couldn’t do it half so well without a good basic reader; I use Feedly. In my reader I load the url’s of people in my classes, professors, and professionals in the field of ed. tech that I follow. Speaking of following, I have a Twitter account that constantly loads tweets from other ed. techies giving me url’s to great, cutting edge articles in this ever-changing field. I keep up with my young students on a secure LMS, called Edmodo, where we all communicate dialectically in our own online classroom sharing research, videos, flashcards, and Socratic conversation on our learning materials. I also have 3 emails; one for personal and younger education use, one for Liberty, and one on Google for other professionals in education and for all things Google. Since all of this could make me appear to drop off the face of the earth, I keep FaceBook for personal sharing that I would, otherwise, never have the time for.
Speaking of time, I am so glad that this ultra, Samsung laptop of mine came with a calendar. I fill it in my need-to-remembers and the day before each of them I am reminded of things I have going on, whew! I also have set of favorite time-savers for lesson planning. YouTube, Sophia, and Khan Academy are just 3 examples of OER’s, or open education resources, (some of them whole lessons!) free to use for my students or my own personal learning; check them out! I can also create lesson plans online and share my time and talent with others as OER’s through Gooru or Fluency 21. But, the most important part of using time well is my time with the Lord. Currently, since so much of my daily life is online, I am able to get right to this every morning because a set of devotions comes right to my email through Bible Gateway. I am going through the Word chronologically in one daily plan plus once a week a topical message from John Piper is sent to me as well. Both of these come with links to the full text in my favorite translation of the Bible. I know that there is no way to be able to do all I do without my Source, my Love, and my Lord; so Bible Gateway is my most favorite tool of all because it nurtures my whole day.