Project Description
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.
ACTIVITIES
Step 1
Create a Doodle poll to propose a meeting with 2-3 of your colleagues to work on the next “Thing”: together!
Step 2
Be sure to answer any Doodle poll invitations from your colleagues who are also working on this Thing – help them out by responding.
Step 3
Download a free trial version of Claro ScanPen app on your cell phone, take a photo of a document, and have it read back to you during your commute home.
OR
Using a Library public workstation, open a PDF document and have the software read it. Scan a document using OCR (optical character recognition) so you can save an edit-friendly copy.
More Information: