How can you enrich your summer study abroad experience?  What will you gain from it?  What is your goal?  What are you learning?  How will you use your experience in the future?  These are a lot more questions.  We don’t offer the answers, but would like to suggest a few tools that will help you to capture your experience.

Blog/ePortfolio – Many students who take language courses at Rice University use ePortfolio to share their experiences in language learning.  If you have not started, you can start with your summer blog on blogs.rice.edu system.  After the summer, you can continue onto the ePortfolio with any class or your life in general.  At the end of your Rice career, you can then export the content and take it with you.

• For the technical notes on ePortfolio, please visit our Tech Support page.

Evernote – A free mobile app which you can make notes, take pictures, etc.  When you get online, it automatically uploads your content to you cloud.  While studying in abroad you may not have a easy WIFI access.  Therefore, this tools comes in very handy.  http://www.evernote.com .

• Evernote is available free as a downloadable app to your computer, web access, or mobile app.

One Second Everyday – $.99 iOS app can create a video of your entire summer study abroad experience.  http://1secondeveryday.com/ Follow the link to watch the concept in TED talk – http://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_kuriyama_one_second_every_day.html . Android app is coming soon.

iPod Touch, 4th Generation – CLIC Lab can loan out an iPod Touch to a student studying abroad with CLIC scholarship.  Please inquire during the orientation.

Tumblr – Of course, many of you will be using social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter.  They all have unique features.  One overlooked SNS is Tumblr.  You can past and share text, photo, video, and audio.  You can also create a draft off-line and upload it when you can get online.  That is very useful while traveling.

• You can save a draft if you don’t have Internet connection.  When done creating a draft, click on cancel button.  This will prompt to bring up “Save as Draft?” prompt.  Once saved as draft, you will see the post icon to have a dog ear.
• You can upload contents via email.  Follow this direction – http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/email_publishing

Mobile devices – If you are taking your mobile phone, please be careful with the usage abroad.  When traveling, it is a good idea to keep your phone in the airplane mode.  Do this while flying, don’t wait until you land.  This will prevent from your phone trying to connect to the cellular service abroad.  If you MUST have data with you all the time, look into rental sim card or rental personal wifi device.  With the rental sim card, you can operate your phone as you would here in the U.S.  If you decide to get the personal wifi device, you may want to put some money in service like Skype to make/receive calls.  If you only have one device, sim card would be the choice.  If you have multiple devices, phone and tablet, then personal wifi device will be more flexible.

Any question – send email to kumahata@rice.edu.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2013 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Useful Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.