Summary of Course Taken

In the 2008/09 academic year, I am entering the third and final year of my IT and Organisations degree. ITO is an ECS programme which aims to give students enough programming and systems knowledge to run a project, but focusses on the necessary management skills to run a team.

Description of Strategies Used

I have been using a Tablet PC since my last year of Sixth - I am not a fan of the touchpads on traditional laptops, and this greatly influenced my choice to get a Tablet. Besides that, no-one else had one and I had wanted one ever since they were first made.

At University, I have made extensive use of Microsoft OneNote in lectures and meetings. Throughout my time at Southampton I have found more and better ways to use the Tablet. OneNote may appear to have questionable purpose on a regular PC or laptop, but on a Tablet PC it really shines. Before lectures, I print the slides into OneNote, ready to be annotated with my own notes. After the lecture, I can search everything in my notebook - including text, handwriting, the printed slides and any text in images. We have put together a OneNote Guide, showing how it can be put to good use in education.

In recent months, I have been making use of Microsoft Groove, a new program in the Office 2007 suite. It is a collaboration program which creates a shared workspace with your colleagues. In English, this means that I can save a file into Groove and it instantly appears on the computers of everyone else in the project. This is great for reviewing other peoples' work, keeping tabs on things and discussing changes. It also has a handy calendar function and serves as a backup for everyone's work.