Saturday, February 04, 2012

Some helpful "techy" stuff for apologists

Like some of you I know, I am a person who is always looking for ways to maximize ways to learn.  Recently, I started listening to all my podcasts on double speed because I simply was not able to keep up.  I'm not sure all ipods have this option, but iphone certainly does and most likely the newer ipod touches.  At first, this was difficult.  But it didn't take long for me to get very used to it.  Now i'm able to keep up in listening to about 10 different podcasts weekly.

Another was a flashcard app that helped me to start learning Greek.  I think the app is just called "flashcards" and costs around $2.99 in the app store.  This app is great because it keeps up with what you know really well, sort of well, and not well at all.  Its basically a flashcard quiz system.  On my lunch breaks i'm able to spend up to 20 minutes daily going through my Greek vocabulary, grammar rules, and translation exercises.  If anyone wants to learn Greek and has an iphone/ipod/ipad, give me a buzz and i'll show you what you'll need to do.  If I can do it, you can do it!

Last, I discovered a really cool app in the Mac app store (not itunes store).  Its called Speak It!.  Its $4.99 but it is able to convert any text into speech.  And not only that, but it can convert it to an audio file so you can play it on your ipod or whatever.  This has been helpful for me because i'm subscribing to too many blogs and downloading too many pdf article that I simply don't have time to read.  In addition, its cutting into my time that I could be using to read books.  So what I do now is I copy and paste whatever blog article or pdf that i'm interested in into the "Speak it!" app and convert to an audio file.  The only downside is, you can only convert to an audio file with a maximum of 1,000 words at a time.  But this is fairly simple to do, since most word processing programs give you word counts.

Feel free to leave in the comments any ideas, advise, or whatever it is you do to maximize your learning in the area of theology, apologetics, etc.

1 comment:

Piltdown Superman said...

I do not speak "Mac", nor do I own any devices or software that begins with "i"-something.

Most podcasts that I need are available through the other evil empire, Google. The Google Reader lets me listen on the spot, but I prefer to "save link as" and play it on my computer while I'm doing data entry. And yes, I like playing at accelerated speed. (Ever notice how some people finally sound like they are speaking at a normal pace when they are actually accelerated?)

For reading, my newest helper is my Kindle (can't say if the others are good or bad, I have no knowledge of them.) Since I have to stare at a screen so much, my eyes go buggy. And much of what I need to read is on the Web. Browser add-ons for services like "Send to Reader", "Kindle It", Amazon's own software that sends a document on your hard drive into conversion and then to your device, all make for a less-eye-straining, more portable and convenient reading experience.