Technology Seems to Rule our Lives

Diaries, letters and phone calls are now often stored electronically. Year 12 student Alison Officer looks at a few technology options that are designed to make us better organised.

Today we can communicate with people thousands of kilometres away in just seconds. Has this conversion to technology made our lives easier? Are we better organised? There are many tools on the web that claim to help you manage your life. A few that I use are:

Texting

Simple but effective. Used for anything from getting study notes, organising to meet friends somewhere, to finding out what time my music lessons are.

MSN

(or other IM e.g. Skype) - It is easy to share documents, so sharing class notes with each other can be done through a computer. It is also very easy to have a multi-way conversation which makes it perfect for organising social events.

Facebook

 (or other social networking sites such as Bebo) - Sites like this have many applications that can be helpful (or just time-wasting). The birthday calendar ensures that no one forgets your birthday. Why not create a group and use a social calendar to track the latest events? Sites like Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live also have personal calendars that are associated with a free email account.

The school intranet

Many schools allow their students to access this from home, but even if you can't, take a look during school hours. There are lots of fun things to do at school like join clubs, sports teams and participate in school events. Information on these can usually be found on the school intranet, or school internet website.

"Stickies"

This is a free downloadable program that creates what look like "Post-It" notes on your desktop. These little notes can be customised to only open with a certain document, fonts, colours, buttons can be changed and saved, they can be hidden for a certain period as specified to act as a reminder, and they can have alarms set to ensure you notice them. Stickies is a very useful application to write ‘to-do' lists on, they have no known bugs, glitches or viruses, and it's completely free! www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/index.html  

There are many websites and tools that claim to make your life a little easier, but I've found that this is the combination that works best for me. Take a look and see what's out there. But be warned, it's addictive.