THING 7 – WORKING SMARTER

There are endless digital tools aimed at making our work easier, but we will look at only a couple of them in this Thing.  Doodle (a digital time/task management tool) and ClaroRead (a digital text reading tool) can help you work smarter, more easily, and more quickly.  Let’s have a look at them …

Doodle is a web-based scheduling tool, great for coordinating times for meetings with a number of people. Forget those back and forth emails to find a time for a meeting (or an office party!)

Some useful features:

• Set up a meeting by using a poll: identify the poll organiser and the poll participants, permit participants to choose from a variety of potential meeting dates and times.
• Doodle may be synched with Outlook calendar.
• Get updates when there is an activity/change/entry via cellphone text messaging or email.
• Add a note/Add people from contact list

ClaroRead is a text-to-speech screen reader software that reads from Word, Email, PDFs and most screen texts. Claroread is recognized both as a literacy support tool (improves listening/learning skills) and an assistive technology tool which may be useful not only to the visually impaired, but to a variety of users.  Some of us may prefer to listen to a document over reading it in certain circumstances.  ClaroRead Plus (available on all public workstations in the Library) can also help you turn a PDF document into a text document that you can edit.

Some useful features:

• Adjustable screen reading speed.
• Converts text to audio file to save in mp3 or video format.
• Word prediction feature can help with your writing: the software suggests words using the internal dictionary for instantaneous word choice and/or editing.