Useful websites, web-tools and web-services

This page is intended as a list of suggested websites you may wish to use to assist you in various tasks. The sites have been chosen as members of the E-Learning Environments team have used them personally and so know that they are good at what they do. These websites are not supported by UCL and we cannot offer you any additional advice or help in using them. If you sign up for an account with any of the sites you do so voluntarily and will be responsible for managing those accounts. You also accept any terms and conditions, so please read these.

You may be interested in a web service called Terms of Service; Didn't Read, this site lists a variety of websites and web services and rates them from a user rights perspective. It is a useful way to get a summary of the terms and conditions, which you must often accept but that most people rarely read. 

Presentation tools

Prezi - online presentation tool, offers collaboration options. Remember to check out the Edu (educational) licenses. 

Slideshare - a great way to share your presentations online. 

PowToons - create presentations and animations. There is a 4Edu section where you can get a free account.

Social bookmarking 

Diigo - bookmark, share and annotate useful webpages. 

Scoop.it - collect and curate useful web resources.

Pinterest - a visual bookmarking system. Create and collaborate on pin boards. 

A useful list of various social bookmarking tools can be found on the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies website. 

Networking tools

LinkedIn - professional social networking.

Adcademia.edu - share your research, an purely academic social networking site. 

Facebook - the most social of the social networks. Normally not advisable for work related tasks, but Pages and Groups can be useful.  

Twitter - micro-blogging site. Very useful for creating networks and connecting via shared interests (hash tags #). Consider having multiple accounts to separate work and personal. 

Bibliographic tools

Endnote - recommended by academic libraries, produced by Thomson Reuters.

Zotero - good for off-campus use.

RefWorks - popular in the academic community.

Online repositories

Dropbox - store and share files.

Google Drive - collaborate and edit documents online, from Google.

OneDrive - create and share documents online, part of Office 365 from Microsoft.

Other useful tools

Storify - useful way to curate and collect social web content, such as Twitter discussions. Often used after conferences. 

IFTTT - If This, Then That is a way of automating certain tasks, such as publishing between social media sites or backing up files in cloud storage.