Digital Tools

We will introduce these tools gradually over the course of the semester. You don't need to rush to get signed into all of them right away.

We will be using a host of digital tools in this class - intended to help everyone learn and work effectively online. I'll talk about these below, but first a caveat (i.e. warning). The course will require some bandwith – for streaming video for lectures, getting course materials and doing assignments. If you're sharing one internet connection with five roommates, for example, this might cause issues if you all are online at the same time. Or you might run out of data at some point if your plan is capped. Or you might be living somewhere where a broadband connection is not even a possibility. In event of such technical issues or accessibilty problems, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can come up with alternate solutions for you.

Many of these tools work best using a computer. So if you are using a tablet or smaller mobile device (which limit, for example, extensions that you can install on your browsers), you may find it more difficult to complete your assignments. If you do not have a computer, therefore, you might wish to find someone who will lend you their computer regularly or you might wish to borrow one of the laptops available from MacOdrum Library (they are still lending despite the pandemic).

We are using tools that should not cost you anything. If any ask you for money, don't pay. Check with the instructions/ with Dr. Saurette to make sure you're using them correctly. Most of the software is distributed freely or is open access. The trade-off of low cost is that some work might be necessary for you to make it work on your system (for example, Zotero's plugin for Safari, the default browser on MacOS computers, is very buggy and Zotero works much better using Chrome).

Other software will be free to you because of arrangements between vendors and Carleton University (e.g. the Microsoft Office suite). For this software, you can download it for free but will need to login (and stay logged in) for it to work.

In brief, here is some of the software we will use regularly:

1. Teams: is a useful communication tool for messenging one another, everybody or yourself (if you want to remind yourself of something). Much of the written communication and spoken between us (the professors, teaching assistants) and you (the students) will be done via Teams because, well, it tends to work and it can be used almost equally well on computers, tablets, smartphones etc.

2. Office 365: Microsoft continues to offer the standard tools for word processing and editing spreadsheets. We will also use Powerpoint for lectures, despite its engineered ugliness.

3. Trello or maybe MS Planner. It makes sense to have a tool for planning out assignments – especially for group projects.

4. Zotero: an incredibly useful tool to download, organize and keep track of web and bibliographic resources you use and find during your research. It can export bibliographies directly into a Word document (which is much less painful than doing each by hand...)

5. cuPortfolio: Carleton's Eportfolio platform. We'll post much of our work here.

6. Perusall: A social annotation site where most of our assigned readings are located and managed.

7. Hypothes.is: A tool for annotating the web. We'll use it for commenting on each others work in cuPortfolio and for working collaboratively to annotate resources together.

8. cuLearn: We are forced by the university to use this as our Learning Management Software. Expect to use this as little as possible in the first term?