To collect all your materials together you will need some sort of research folder. You can also use a traditional paper folder for this, but there are many free internet-based tools which can help you. In this section of the website, we look at some of these tools. You may already have your own internet tools (in which case you can skip this section and move on). You also may not want to use everything. Have a try at setting up some of these tools and find out what works for you. Don’t feel you have to try everything at once. You can always come back and try new things when you need them.
Keeping a research blog
A blog (or weblog) is a great way of bringing everything together. There are a number of good free services for you to use. WordPress.com is the world’s most popular blogging service. Tumblr is another popular service and easy to use.
Social bookmarks
You may want to bookmark useful web pages you have visited so you can find them later. You can do this using your web browser – Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox etc. using the bookmarks button. Diigo is a service which stores your bookmarks and allows you to access them from any computer. Also, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you and attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages. This is a great idea if you want to share your searches with your son or daughter.
Diigo also allows you to share bookmarks with others through Diigo groups. We have set up a group – Understanding Careers – for this website and have added the different links from the site to the group.
This is a closed group and you will need to apply to join. Once you are a member you can share links with other users of the site.
Google docs
Google docs can be good for storing and sharing documents. It can support shared editing. So, you and your son or daughter can work together on your research folder.
We will also show you how to use some of the visualisation tools provided by Google docs to make sense of Labour Market Information and information about the various university courses.
If you already have a Google email account or a YouTube account you will have access to Google docs. If not, you will need to set up an account.
RSS readers
RSS readers or feed aggregators, often known as blog readers, allow you to automatically collect and update feeds from different websites and blogs. Not only can you use this to collect updates form university and official web sites, but you can track people doing different careers and jobs that might be of interest.
There are a number of tools you could use. The most popular is the free Google Reader and once more if you already have a Google account you can set up the Reader in minutes.
We will suggest some useful careers related blogs you might want to follow.
Twitter is a microblogging website. It allows you to exchange messages of up to 140 characters. You can follow other people and see their updates and (if you allow it) others can follow your messages.
Twitter can be very useful for finding out what people in different occupations actually do and we will be suggesting you use it to ask questions and get quick feedback.