WI+RE's tech toolbox (a snapshot)

Posted by Doug Worsham

Curious to know how WI+RE puts together our online learning modules? While it is true that the most important part of our work is the learner-led design process, technology tools play an important role as well. Here’s a quick list of WI+RE’s current toolbox, with links to some of the tutorials new WI+RE designers use to get to know these tools.

Asana

WI+RE makes extensive use of a free Asana account. It is our most important online communication tool and has become absolutely essential for both onboarding and project management. We really like how it helps foster asynchronous collaboration and communication for a team of student designers with variable and flexible work schedules!

HTML and CSS (bootstrap)

The foundation for our web work, we use free tutorials on codecademy to get to know the basics of html and css. We also find ourselves constantly refering to https://getbootstrap.com/docs/ to tinker with the bootstrap CSS framework.

Markdown

We also use quite a bit of markdown for web work. WI+RE students have liked this quick markdown tutorial

Github and github pages

Github and github pages are essential tools for WI+RE as we use them to host our website and tutorials! We use github pages because: it is free, it let’s us build a pretty robust website but doesn’t use a database to serve up pages (which means there are very few security concerns), and it allows us to share our code freely on one of the world’s largest open code-sharing sites! WI+RE students start learning GitHub using this getting started guide

H5P

Many of our recent projects - including the Cornerstone Research Workshop Series and Wheel of Sources - use H5P to add interactive elements to videos and slideshows.

Creative Commons

Perhaps not really a “technology” in the traditional sense, but we use and talk about creative commons quite a bit, so new WI+RE students watch and discuss a short video on creative commons and how it works

Audacity

We use the audacity site itself to introduce this free and super handy audio recording program.

Hype

One of only a few paid applications in the WI+RE toolbox, Hype has been a key tool for many of our projects. We use it to create HTML5 animations. WI+RE students get to know Hype primarily through experimentation as they create their learning narrative videos, but we use introductory YouTube videos to get them started.

Noun Project

We also have a paid account for Noun Project b/c it is awesome! You’ll see visuals from the noun project throughout WI+RE’s work and so having a paid account is super important for us. Having quick access to a massive collection of well designed visuals has become essential to WI+RE’s process. Oh, and we also sometimes use https://fontawesome.com/ for icons as well!


Banner photo credit: unsplash-logoFleur


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Doug Worsham

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