There are many new tools offering new, more effective ways of achieving old goals. This session provides an overview of some of the digital tools you might find useful for organising information, keeping track of your notes, working collaboratively, and keeping up to date. We share some of our tips for making the best use of technology:

There's a lot of stuff on Google. How can you find the things you really need? In these slides, from our Academic Googling session, we also look at the other places where academic sources of information can be found, and learn how to tailor our search skills to take advantage of different tools.

What makes a reliable source of information, and how might we use such sources in support of an argument? In this session we explore frameworks for evaluating information and determining credibility, and we apply these to a resource with which we are all familiar: Wikipedia. We learn the basics of editing Wikipedia and try to add some much-needed citations by evaluating information from appropriately credible sources.

Where do you start when looking at academic literature? How can you successfully engage with the literature you find? This bitesized tutorial explores the structure of academic articles, shows where to look to check the validity of findings, and offers tips for navigating online texts.

When you do a Google search or a search in the library, you will get a massive reading list. How do you choose which are the best texts? Who do you trust? Where do you get the most reliable data from? In this session you will learn how to select the most appropriate reading for the task you have to complete.

Taking notes isn't just about what notes you take...it's also about where you take them.

There's no best place to take and store your notes. What is important is that you find an approach that works for you, ensuring that you can find your notes again when you need them and can access them however you want to. You might find one particular application is good for you, or you might use a combination of apps for different purposes, or use a notebook and an app, or even just use a notebook. We'll look at the features of some note-taking apps available at the University of York, but you may find other ones that suit you better.

Google Keep

Keep is Google's note-taking application. You can log into Keep in a web browser at keep.google.com or use the Keep apps for iOS and Android to use it on your phone or tablet.

Key features of Google Keep:

• Write notes in a sticky note format, with the ability to add a title, or add checkboxes to notes to turn into a to-do list.
• Handwrite and draw notes either in a web browser or on mobile apps, with some handwriting recognition features.
• Change the colour of notes and add labels for organisation.
• Use the mobile apps to record voice notes that have some transcription features.
• Turn a note into a Google Doc for futher formatting by clicking a Copy to Google Docs button.
• Share notes with others by adding Collaborators.

Google Keep is good for short notes or for making handwritten or spoken notes, particularly on the go. You might use it together with Google Docs, by making brief notes in Google Keep and then copying them to Google Docs to write up more fully or add other content.

Microsoft OneNote

In the resources for our Taking note of note taking applications session, we showcase some online note taking applications, looking at how you can annotate PDFs and other online documents to be efficient with you note taking.

"...it was just the quote I needed, but now I can't remember where I found it!"

How do you manage the sources you find? We take a look at how we can collect, manage and automatically cite references using reference management software.

Suffering from information overload? Need to get your social media to work better for you? Here we cover setting up alerts so that you get information in a timely and relevant manner.

When producing academic writing such as a dissertation, you should be able to enjoy the helpful features in Microsoft Word. The presentation below includes screenshots and exercises to help you grasp the key elements of MS Word which will help you produce material to a professional standard as efficiently as possible. This includes content such as headers and footers, Styles and handling images.