Pro­to­cols for Gen­er­al Com­put­er-lev­el Orga­ni­za­tion:

I have always believed that orga­ni­za­tion is key when doing any work, espe­cial­ly on the com­put­er. I teach my stu­dents about fold­er struc­tures and using appro­pri­ate file names when work­ing with com­put­er doc­u­ments or oth­er relat­ed files. I have been fol­low­ing these pro­to­cols with­in my own stud­ies for my Mas­ters of Edu­ca­tion­al Tech­nol­o­gy here. I cre­at­ed a UVic MASTERS main par­ent fold­er where I plan to put doc­u­ments and files that per­tain to the entire pro­gram. So far I have one doc­u­ment with­in this fold­er, Edu­ca­tion­al Tech­nol­o­gy: Software/Platform Links, where I have been devel­op­ing an anno­tat­ed list of links with descrip­tions for web­sites and pro­grams I find use­ful with­in the course­work. For exam­ple, I have head­ings for Uvic Appli­ca­tions, Research Appli­ca­tions, AI Appli­ca­tions, Writ­ing Appli­ca­tions, Graph­ics Appli­ca­tions, Teaching/Learning Appli­ca­tions, and Edu­ca­tion­al Tech­nol­o­gy Appli­ca­tions. As I feel this is a very use­ful work­ing doc­u­ment, I also shared this with the oth­er stu­dents with­in my MEd cohort.  I fur­ther cre­at­ed fold­ers for each course I am enrolled in, EDCI 515 and EDCI 570/1 where I am orga­niz­ing all rel­e­vant files and doc­u­ments for each course. I will fur­ther cre­ate addi­tion­al fold­ers for sub­se­quent cours­es.

Pro­to­cols for Using Zotero and Orga­niz­ing Jour­nal Arti­cles:

As far as orga­niz­ing myself with­in the lit­er­a­ture, I pri­mar­i­ly use Zotero: a free, easy-to-use tool to help you col­lect, orga­nize, anno­tate, cite, and share research. This soft­ware is extreme­ly use­ful in orga­niz­ing all of our jour­nal arti­cles, text­books and pdf files. I have been cre­at­ing “col­lec­tions” or fold­ers for each of the cours­es to store all of the applic­a­ble files in an orga­nized man­ner, as well cre­at­ing new col­lec­tions for spe­cif­ic top­ics like “North­ern Com­mu­ni­ties” for my edu­ca­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy issue I am most inter­est­ed in cur­rent­ly, and “ePort­fo­lios” which was my group pre­sen­ta­tion top­ic. In fact, I fur­ther cre­at­ed a “Group Library” titled 570_eportfolios and shared it to my fel­low group pre­sen­ters so we had a place to share and col­lab­o­rate our arti­cles. With­in Zotero, not only can I orga­nize my files but the pow­er of this pro­gram allows me to fur­ther engage in my read­ings by high­light­ing key areas of the pdf, make notes with­in the read­ings, and then “Add note from anno­ta­tions” which essen­tial­ly com­piles all of your high­lights in a text doc­u­ment. This is an absolute­ly amaz­ing fea­ture! Fur­ther­more, Zotero is also embed­ded in Google Docs and Word enabling me to cite ref­er­ences direct­ly from Zotero into these plat­forms and thus cre­ate a run­ning bib­li­og­ra­phy of sources cit­ed in my writ­ings.

Pro­to­cols for Find­ing Jour­nal Arti­cles:

The last part of my orga­ni­za­tion­al rou­tines for engage­ment with Edu­ca­tion­al Tech­nol­o­gy research relates to find­ing jour­nal arti­cles. Ini­tial­ly, I begin my search­es using Boolean key­words through the UVic Online Library to start find­ing arti­cles relat­ing to my top­ic of choice. After find­ing some rel­e­vant arti­cles and read­ing through them, I then look at their bib­li­ogra­phies and search for some of these ref­er­ences which I find to be specif­i­cal­ly relat­ed to my top­ic. Of course, not every ref­er­ence form any giv­en arti­cle will be on point to my top­ic, typ­i­cal­ly only sec­tions of an arti­cle may ful­ly relate to my top­ic thus only spe­cif­ic ref­er­ences will thus relate too. I have found that using these pro­to­cols has enabled me to start devel­op­ing my own cat­a­log of ref­er­ences towards my own research top­ics.