Other tools to improve your working environment

After presenting the Google tools yesterday I want to present other tools that might also help to improve the working experience. One of these tools is Symbaloo a tool which helps you to organize your browser by creating an individual page with all the important websites that you need every day.  I have created an example which I present you in the following screenshot:


Another tool that might be interesting for you is Hootsuite a social media management tool. It allows you to manage all of your social accounts like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube on one page.

I have learned of these tools during a course which I took at the Universidad de Burgos.
In this blogpost, I also want to answer some questions that where asked in the course:

1. What social networks can I use to do research?
   For me personally, the most used network is Researchgate as this platform connects many researchers throughout the world. Besides this, I am using many different platforms to get information and stay in contact with others. At the current time with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic youtube has become a big platform for me, as it contains conferences that couldn`t take place as they usually would. 
2. How can I take advantage of using these social networks within my scope of knowledge?
   As previously mentioned especially at the current moment the social networks offer an alternative to the classical meet-ups and conference that I would attend and they allow us, researchers, to stay connected. 
3. What is your opinion about social networking services for the researcher 2.0?
   I think every researcher of the current date need to utilize social networks to stay connected and up-to-date. I am already using a lot of these tools in my daily work like the Google tool suite or Researchgate. These tools make my life a lot easier and most often is the only drawback of the data privacy concerns. 

After explaining all this I want to give all fellow students at the University of Burgos feedback for the course Investigación 2.0:

I can really recommend the course as it provides a lot of information which is important for every researcher. What I liked the most about it was the diversity of support that was offered through videos, documents and a forum. This was especially important, as I am not from Spain and therefore not familiar with the language that the course was intended for. Despite this, I could take the course as I could use a translated version of the documents instead of the videos. 

I also liked the practical way that all of the information are presented. Instead of just a bunch of theoretical concepts, the course is designed around trying the tools out.