Online project management to manage deadlines

“I use online project management systems for managing deadlines for course work, assignments and deadlines for club and society activities.  I like to use ones that can be colour coded depending on the urgency and also where I can add alarms!”

Gantter project management

Gantter is a free Gantt chart project management system that offers some colour coding and easy ways to add tasks and resources.  It offers links to online calendars and iCalendar and Google which can send reminders, as well as exporting to Microsoft Project and to Google Drive for sharing with others.  Google have provided a YouTube video with an overview of Gantter

Microsoft Office and OneNote hidden text to speech command!

A freely available way of using text to speech in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote and even
Excel is possible thanks to the Microsoft Office ribbon command menu.  You can select text and have it read back.  This idea does not offer all that specialist programs can provide such as text highlighting, pausing etc. but it is a quick way to hear how a word, phrase or sentence sounds when you want a quick check.
Adding speech in Word

If you go to Quick Access Toolbar in the ribbon you customise it by choosing More Commands – select ‘Quick Access toolbar’ from the menu on the left > Then go to the top of the right hand window and make sure you drop down the command list to ‘All commands’ otherwise you will not see ‘Speak’  in the list – Add it and return to your document.

Choose speech iconWhen you have typed something or have a file to read – highlight the text and select the new speech bubble that appears in your Quick Access toolbar.  The text will be read aloud in any voice you have chosen from the Control Panel > Speech recognition > text to speech. 

control panel screen grab

This comes thanks to Jean

iPod Touch to record lectures.

“I use the iPod touch voice record function to record lectures. In addition to paper notes, this provides a means of revisiting lecture material for revision, especially if concentration fails during the actual lecture especially if I am very tired during a lecture.”

The iPod touch voice memos “saved in a Recordings folder on iPod in the WAV file format. If you enable iPod for disk use, you can drag voice memos from the folder to copy them.”

iPod voice memoMacWorld has a useful article about recording voice memos on the iPod and iPhone with some notes about the different versions and the extra accessories needed for some models.