“Babelbar works with Facebook, Twitter and Google docs. It is useful if you do not have your own text to speech program.”
Babelbar is an extension or add-on for internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari and appears over the web page. You need to highlight the text first then it will speak. It can change the colour background, font size and translate text.
Attendee at Accessing the Higher Ground Conference
“In order to organise my courseware I use an online tool called Evernote. This helps me to ‘clip’ useful information from websites and also to save some reminders. The app can be used online as a web app and also installed as a Chrome browser bookmark or Android and iPhone mobile or tablet app. The offline app can then sync to your profile.” Andreas (MSc Web Science)
Keith Everett has provided a useful YouTube video about how he has worked with Evernote and he shows the Chrome browser bookmark as well as talking about linking with a mobile phone.
“I use Google Scholar to search for materials and useful information for my studies and find this can lead to reading other papers as a result of the links to similar articles. It also helps when you want to cite a paper as it gives you the layout for the citation.” Katherine
I have an Orange / T-mobile account on my iPhone and with CalenGoo syncing with my Google calendar I can set up SMS reminders as well as email or pop up ones. The app costs £4.99 but allows for so many more options compared to the built in calendar on the iPhone including the chance to sync with multiple calendars. This means calendars can be set up for special projects. Colour coding and large fonts with zoom make it a calendar that is easy to read even on a small screen. Lots of online support is provided by the developers
CalenGoo is also available for Android phones and costs £4.63
“It wasn’t until I had my vision tested that I discovered I had a green colour deficiency and so colour overload is a problem, such as occurs in some pie-charts. I tend to use blue as this is usually a safe colour for presentations and when developing web pages if you have a colour deficiency – blue, pale colours. When items are highlighted, the text goes white on a blue background.
To show you how this looks I have made a PowerPoint presentation about colour deficiencies – it is available for download from Slideshare.”
Jim – Computer Science.
This could save the day when you cannot think what to write in certain parts of an assignment or dissertation – the University of Manchester has an Academic Phrasebank.
It is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological “nuts and bolts” of writing organised under the headings to the left. It was designed primarily with international students whose first language is not English in mind. However, if you are a native speaker writer, you may still find parts of the material helpful.
Thanks to Andy McMahon