New-Found Technologies and My Career

Over the past few weeks, thanks to one of my masters courses, I have been exposed to new technologies easily found on the web. These sites and applications have been interesting and fun. In my career, however, I would not use these technologies. My career is based on confidentiality for the athletes I work with. I would not use twitter, facebook, flickr, or blogger for my professional use. These are inappropriate and risky when dealing with sensitive issues, and I see no place for them in my current position and field. I could definitely use these socially, to keep in touch with friends and family, but would never post anything related to my work. I could, however, use Bloglines and GoogleDocs. Bloglines would make it much easier for me to stay connected with the outside world and the latest news on my favorite sports teams as well as the other athletic teams at my university. When I am on the road with track & field I can easily find out how the baseball team did at USC, or how tennis dominated at NCAAs. With GoogleDocs I could create daily treatment logs while on the road or create educational documents and updates and send them to student interns. I can manage presentations and create inventory spreadsheets to stay on top of what we need to order. I definitely think that all of these technologies have their place in the world, just maybe not in the field of Sports Medicine.

Web2.0 & TeamSnap

Web2.0 is constantly making life easier and more fun. Having all of my favorite sites and local and national news brought to me at the click of button, all in one area, is incredible. As I was searching the Web2.0 awards list of sites, I stumbled upon one site called TeamSnap that really caught me by surprise. This website offers a unique way to manage a sports team that you coach or manage. When I was playing soccer in college, some of my teammates and I would coach a youth soccer team during our off-season as a part of community involvement as well as a hobby we thoroughly enjoyed! It was always so difficult keeping track of our players stats and monthly payments. We had game and tournament schedules posted all over our refrigerators, a pictures of our players saved in folders on our computers. This TeamSnap site would have been a life saver and really neat for the players. It would have allowed us to keep track of our schedule, players fees and payments, track and post our players stats, post messages and email our team and their parents, post photos for the team to look at and their parents to print, and even allow us to make a schedule of who is bringing refreshments for the end of the game. This would have made the behind-the-scenes part of our jobs as coaches much easier, more fun and interactive for the players and parents. If I ever find the time to get back to coaching I will DEFINITELY use this site on my team!

The simplicity of GoogleDocs

Google has really taken the web to the next level. As an athletic trainer who is constantly on the road, it can be tedious getting all of the injury reports, daily treatment logs, student intern educational documents, inventory checklists, etc. done and sent to the correct recipients, or saved for future reference. Google docs creates a "one stop shop" in which I can create my documents, spreadsheets, or electronic presentations and have them saved in one place and be able to easily send them to co-workers or students. This is a rather easy web-based application to navigate through and is very user friendly. I can see myself using this often especially on the road, so that I don't have to worry about attachments and having information saved in different areas on my computer. I can log-in and have it sitting right there in front of me, without having to search for it!

RSS Feeds and Bloglines

The world of technology is getting out of hand. It is remarkable how far we have come in just the past decade. Bloglines is one of the coolest and easiest things I have ever subscribed to. There are days where I sit at work and want to check up on some news real fast: find the latest celebrity dirt, see what the news on the Braves is, what's going on in the english premier league, etc. I am never successful and fully caught up on whats going on outside of my world because it takes too long to navigate and open up new windows and find the "news" icon. Let alone I never have enough time to even read one article before being pulled away and back to work. Setting up a bloglines reader may be one of the greatest things I have ever done! Now I have all of my favorite news and the stuff I want to read all at the touch of my fingertips, on one site! It was extremely easy to set up, and now I am already addicted and have wasted so much time getting caught up on my favorite topics! Thank you Bloglines for setting up such a user friendly read, and Scott for introducing this to me! Very excited!