Organisation and Time Management: Tools for Study. An overview of using Evernote, Trello, Mendeley and ClaroCapture to manage your time and organise your academic material. This workshop will cover 4 tools you may find useful for organising your work and managing your time

What is it and what is it good for? Project management tool. Digital equivalent of laying out post it notes on your floor. Allows you to prioritise your tasks and set deadlines. Cloud-based so can be accessed wherever you have an internet connection. Could be useful for e.g. group presentations, organising your study time on a module, research projects. The phrase ‘project management’ is often heard in a corporate context. What could it mean in academia?: essays, assignments, getting to grips with the elements of a module you are enrolled on etc. Digital equivalent of writing lists on paper, crossing things off, throwing them away when you’re done. Trello operates similarly, but online.

Terms used by Trello https://trello.com Boards: refers to the name of the project itself, or the task you want to achieve, e.g. the name of the presentation you are working on, or the name of a module that you are taking. Lists: refers to the steps you need to work through, your workflow. A typical way to name lists is ‘to do’, ‘doing, ‘done’. Cards: refers to the actual task you need to do to complete the project. Trello is free and easy to sign up for Demonstration of creating a personal board in Trello, adding lists and cards Demonstration of creating a team in Trello, and adding team members to a collaborative board. YouTube tutorial available here: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/6865419

Trello ‘Board’. My project is to complete a module called “Creative Archives SSPA07S5S”. My ‘Lists’ are labelled “To Do” “Doing” “Done” and I will move my cards across these lists as I complete them. My ‘Cards’ have tasks that need completing e.g. “Background reading for essay”.

Example of a ‘Card’ labelled “Week 2 pre-lecture reading”. I have set a due date for completing this card (Trello shows me this is overdue!). I have colour coded it in orange so that I can use filters later to focus on this type of task. I have added a checklist of readings I need to complete and ticked one as complete.

Recap of Trello’s features: Name your ‘lists’ (workflow), and add ‘cards’ (tasks) that need to be completed. Move cards between lists as you complete them. Attach due dates to cards. Trello will notify you by email when the date is looming. Attach documents and links to cards for easy referral. Create checklists within a card and Trello will show your progress as you work through it. Colour code your cards so you can focus on specific tasks. Connect Trello with work you are doing in other apps such as Evernote – interoperable. If the Trello board is collaborative, each member assigned to a task will receive an email to remind them when a task is due to be completed If you want to oversee the board, but not attach yourself to individual cards, ‘subscribe’ to the board and you will be notified whenever a member of your team completes a card, moves it to a new list or adds a comment

Brainstorm: What are some situations where you might use Trello? How would you name your lists/workflow for each of these tasks? Ideas: Essays, workflow might be: “research”, “write”, “finishing touches”, “done”. Designing a website, workflow might be: “design”, “content” etc. Personal projects e.g. a training day, event etc.

Now to focus on managing your reading material. Scenario wherein you have gathered loads of good material from the e-library, but how to manage all the good quotes, info etc? Could print out articles, use highlighters, sticky markers etc…. or use reference management software to replicate this experience

What is it and what is it good for? Reference management tool. Can be used to create your bibliography and insert citations into your essays (we won’t be looking at this function today). Your own mini-library where can keep all your readings in one place. Cloud-based, so can be accessed wherever you have an internet connection. There is also a desktop version you can download. You can annotate PDFs within Mendeley, just as you would if you had printed them out. Like other reference management software such as EndNote and Zotero, Mendeley can be used to create your bibliography and insert citations into your essay. This function will not be covered in this session Mendeley can be used as your own mini-Library, into which you can import articles from the e-library (and elsewhere on the Web) There is a Desktop version which has more functionality that the Web version, and the two can be synced. Once an article has been imported into Mendeley, you can annotate it as you would with a printed article

https://www.mendeley.com/ What do you do with a printed article that you’d like to be able to do with one you are reading online? Brainstorm things that you’d normally do with a printed article: add sticky notes, highlight, write notes directly onto page Free to create a Mendeley account: video tutorials https://www.mendeley.com/guides/videos

My Mendeley Library. I have labelled my folders according to module name. Articles that I used for each essay are filed within each folder. Middle section lists the articles in each folder. A PDF icon means full text can be viewed. Selecting an article allows you to see citation detials. This is also where you can import the full text/PDF.

Open an article with full text in the Mendeley Viewer. Use the toolbar along to the top to select colours to highlight text and add notes directly to the text. Search for keywords within the full text. You can also perform this search across your whole Mendeley Library.

Recap of Mendeley’s features Organise material into folders, e.g. by essay title, module name. Import articles from the e-Library. If using Chrome, download the Mendeley extension which will make it easier to import articles. Articles imported into Mendeley can be annotated in a similar way to printed articles: highlight, add ‘sticky notes’. Being online provides the added benefit of being able to search for keywords within an article (saves reading time!). You can also search for keywords throughout whole Mendeley Library. Desktop version can be synced with Web version. Use Mendeley as a document manager and organise your material into folders which are meaningful to you. You can import the full text of the article into the Mendeley Library, or just note the citation. If you are using the Desktop version, you can add Mendeley to your bookmarks and import articles using this. Using the Web version, you can download the extension for Chrome. If you have specific themes/authors/ideas that you remember you have read previously in an article, you can search for these using the Search box, and Mendeley will find this within the text (saves you having to read the whole article again).

Exercise Using Chrome, open a browser window Go to www.mendeley.com, click the sign in button and create a Mendeley account Open a new browser tab and go to the Chrome Web store https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions Search for ‘Mendeley’ and click the blue ‘+ Add to Chrome’ button on the right. You should see the Mendeley extension appear on the top right of your Chrome browser window Open a new browser tab and to to www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/elib Search for the journal Archives and Records. Enter your username & password to access the journal. Select any article Birkbeck has access to. Click the Chrome Mendeley extension to import the article’s details into your Mendeley library. If this has not automatically brought the PDF of the full text, go back to the e-Library, download the PDF and save it to your computer. Go back to your Mendeley library, select the citation you have just imported and import the PDF in here by clicking ‘Click or drag file here’ Open the article’s full text and practise highlighting sections, adding sticky notes and performing keyword searches

What is it and what is it good for? Extracts text, audio and images from documents or webpages and groups into a project. Great way to keep quotes grouped together around ideas/themes. Not cloud-based but can be accessed on the Birkbeck computers via the ClaroRead toolbar or its own icon on the desktop. Not cloud based, but accessible via the College computers. Extract sections of text from a document. Use ‘Capture selected text’ to pull text out and put into a ClaroCapture project. If your document is in Word format, use ‘Capture Highlighted Text in Word’ and group by themes of your choice. This can then be exported to Word. Could be a great way to start an essay. Remember to add the page numbers you’ve taken the text from to avoid plagiarising, as ClaroCapture does not automatically bring page numbers over. ClaroCapture video tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLelnJBpEAOwI0gaXGN-jRxRSYFdhAAIwa

ClaroCapture collects text that you select into a ‘project’. If your article is in PDF format, convert it into a Word document using ClaroRead and utilise the highlight function in Word so that ClaroCapture will group together the text extracts by themes of your choice.

Recap of ClaroCapture’s features Use ‘Capture Selected Text’ or ‘Capture Screen Section’ options to extract text and images from documents and webpages. Convert PDF articles into Word, and use ‘Capture Highlighted Text in Word’ option to group text extracts according to themes of your choice. Make sure you enter the page numbers that the extracted text comes from – ClaroCapture doesn’t do this for you Export your ClaroCapture project to Word, PowerPoint etc.