Things 17 - ELM Productivity Tools

Wow, there was a lot to do in this Thing! All good, useful stuff! Fortunately, I've done most of these before and had accounts set up, etc. I did not end up creating the RSS for the Ebsco Search Alert as I already have 4 search alerts sent to my email each month. I did add one new one of those, though! They are a quick and easy way for me to stay current with those periodicals. I'm much more apt to go out and read one of the articles I run across in the TOC sent to me via email (along with links to the Full-text article) than I am to leaf through a print journal I receeve. It works well for me!

I had never tried the Ebsco Page Composer before, so I did go through those steps. It was slick since I already had an account setup. I'm not sure I see many of my students utilizing these advanced features unless it is part of an assignment. I would love to see something like this incorporated into our Intro to Microcomputers course, but they have so much to cover in there already...maybe an "extra" for advanced students who can work through the bulk of that class quickly?? Or maybe as a way to use some of the stuff they learn in that class in "real life."

Again with the ProQuest database I have used many of the features before - but I hadn't created a webpage first before emailing links to myself. One thing I didn't like was that you could only put in one email address at a time. In the directions it said to email it to yourself and a colleague, but in order to do that you have to recreate the webpage and then email it to someone else. Not a big deal and easy enough to do, but I would have preferred to have been able to put more than one email address in at a time.

netLibrary -- another tool I use regularly. I was just walking a student through some of the described features last week! There are so many cool things to do with e-books, but they haven't caught on in our institution as much as I'd like. We keep working to introduce more students and classes to them, though!