Last month Pro Bono Net and LSNTAP took the legal community back to school with the 50 Tech Tips webinar. Xander Karsten, the LawHelp Program Coordinator here at Pro Bono Net, moderated the webinar. I suppose one could say he was the principal! The lesson plan covered website launches, productivity and efficiency enhancers, and data analysis and visualization with some general purpose tips thrown in for fun.
Kim Marhsall, Content Developer & Project Manager at Arkansas Legal Services Partnership, kicked things off by highlighting some efficiency enhancing services and apps. My personal favorites were the speed-reading app Spritz (and for PDFs readsy), the language teacher Duolingo, and word finders such as One Look and Tip of My Tongue.
Tony Lu, Citizenship Works Project Coordinator at the Immigration Advocates Network, augmented Kim’s presentation with a focus on general productivity tools. For collaborative project management he recommended Trello and for those times when you’re in a loud office and need to focus, check out Noisli or Simply Noise.
Coming off his recent partnership with Pro Bono Net on OlmsteadRights.org Talley Wells, the Disability Integration Project Director at Atlanta Legal Aid Society, gave some tips for launching a website. Talley’s central tip was to plan, plan plan! Make sure you know what is and, maybe more importantly, what is not possible and think about the site from a user perspective. A good best practice is to have a soft launch and audit your site for accessibility before and after as users find bugs and other issues. In addition, Brian recommended the LSNTAP Guide on accessibility and the Wave.WebAIM tool.
Jessie Posilkin, the Training and Implementation Specialist at LSC, concluded the webinar with some fantastic tips on data analysis and visualization. For those just starting out, she recommended Tuva Labs and School of Data as great resources to learn how to use and display data compellingly. For a bit more advanced work she highlighted SQL School as a great place to learn database querying.
The webinar lived up to the hype and is a great resource for anyone looking for simple (and powerful!) tech tips and hacks. Materials are available on the SWEB Support Site and join us for the next LSNTAP/PBN webinar, Innovations in technology-enabled pro bono!