Applications used during the ICT Module

Wordle – is great in producing “word clouds” from text that one provides. These words appear in various sizes and various angles to help indicate which ones are more crucial. I can particularly use this software in preparing my lecture materials e.g. on the topic like health and safety which would have associated words like hazard, pathway, receptor, risk, severity / impact, probability / likelihood, etc.; while health and safety remain the most important words among all.

Hot Potatoes – It is a set or suite of six applications which can enable to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises; used with the Internet. I believe this can be employed as to break ice, socialize and even motivate students in classroom if they not feeling particularly active. However, I need to master it before I could use if for these purposes.

Socrative – is a student response system that is smart. Teachers can employ this to gather response in the form of data from their students via their smart phones, laptops, and tablets. I shall have to learn this technology and try it with my colleagues in classroom setting before applying it full-on with my students.

PowerPoint – I already knew fairly enough about this application as I have been using it in my lectures and international conferences to present my research. However, it was useful to refresh on existing and learn some new features. I shall keep using this application and capitalize on it.

Prezi – is a new presentation tool that I learnt and probably can be used as an alternative to PowerPoint. However, since I am use to using PowerPoint and there is a range of features in PowerPoint that yet need to be learnt by me to render my skills on this application yet more professional. I am likely to stick to PowerPoint at the moment.

Nearpod – My comments for this are same as Prezi, above. However, the feature of using it for quiz and poll in classroom is particularly attractive for me. But then, PowerPoint also has interactive polls / clicker feature which can be used for quiz and poll purposes.

Word – the feature of citation and referencing was particularly learnt by me. I am not sure if I shall be using it as I have to key in all the information (on all references I am to cite) in certain fields before it can be used effectively in the document under construction. I find it much quicker to do referencing manually as I have been doing since ever. Probably, I need to try this to come out of my bias. But in the past I used End-Note and Reference-Manager, but they were not as helpful, especially for they had to be updated regularly with new literature.

Excel – New features in writing formulas were leant which enhance my skills on this particular aspect and hopefully can be used by me in my work, research and advising students.

Note:
For more details on my experience and use of Microsoft applications, please see my earlier post entitled 'Personal Experience with Microsoft Applications'