Jordan Carmer Portfolio Assignment

Additional Digital Tools

These additional tools are a great example of what tools can be implemented by teachers in their lessons or used by students in their work. Like any software, they do require some learning on the part of the users, and so teachers may have to take time to familiarize themselves with them beforehand. But I believe this effort to be worth it, as outfitting ourselves for a digital world can help us to better serve our students. 

Zotero

Zotero is an opensource software that assists users in organizing their sources when conducting research. With a built-in button for browsers, users are able to log online sources in their Zotero library for use in their papers. Users can also manually enter information about physical sources such as books. Zotero features a plugin for programs like Microsoft Word that also make the business of citing said sources far more convenient than needing to enter the citations or constructing a bibliography manually.

RAWGraphs

RAWGraphs allows users to enter large data sets and use the tools on the website to construct visual representations to display that data. Users can manage the colors and scale of the visualizations, as well as choose what from the data set makes it in to the final product. In doing this, data that might have otherwise been more time consuming to wholly analyze can now be compressed and made more easily readable.

Voyant

Voyant is a textual analysis tool that can analyze a large body of works and produce raw data about those works for the user. Though the data first produced by Voyant might have limited use, the tool allows users to manipulate the data in a number of ways. Users can choose words to exclude, check for patterns and correlations, and select new visual representations for the data that alter what they can learn from it.