Thursday 25 August 2011

Prezi, Doodle & Survey Monkey

Okay, I admit, I wasn’t very patient with Prezi.  It looks straightforward but is actually…a bit of a faff.  Well, when you’re racing towards the finish line and don’t have hours to while away on it, perhaps it just seems that way. 

Anyway, it looks impressive.  I watched the one on the 23 Things blog, and the one created by ‘For Your I.A’s Only’.  Both were great – imaginative, visually pleasing and engaging.  Definitely the sort of tool you'd want to use in a presentation, and I intend to put it to good use next time I’m up there preaching to the masses.  As mentioned by the 23 Things team, it has so much more impact than PowerPoint.  I just wish it didn't make me feel the same way IKEA flat-pack furniture makes me feel - frustrated and borderline suicidal.  But that's what you get for not reading the instructions, I guess. I'll come back to this though - and will make a prezi on my experiences of using Prezi.  How brilliantly ironic of me.

On to the next Thing: Doodle.  I found this refreshingly simple.  It took me all of two minutes to set up a meeting and send out the invitations.  I always find it frustrating trying to arrange meetings with people from different areas within the university - we're a busy bunch and rarely around at the same time so this is definitely a useful tool for arranging meetings that involve people from various locations, with varying availability.  Of course, I could send them an Outlook calendar request but is this really necessary when the meeting is just a one-off? In future I'll be using Doodle to make meeting arranging a doddle.

Thing 15: Survey Monkey

Creating visible and easy to use feedback systems is something I've been working on at SHS, and the Subject Librarians are planning to use Survey Monkey during the next round of training and inductions.   It's so easy to use and I like the simple format.  I created a survey on the use of QR codes as a promotional tool:

Overall I found the above tools useful and I know I'll be using them again and again, long after I've completed the 23 Things course.

1 comment:

  1. So you liked survey monkey? I've been looking for a survey tool, but there are so many to choose from.

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