Mind Tools is a website that helps develop essential skills for careers. It provides many resources and toolkits to help develop skills mostly for corporate jobs and entrepreneurship. However, individually, none of these actually specifically meet an outcome for entrepreneur, they only help to build and understand a certain skill in an outcome (which they do quite well I might add). For example, this website discusses leadership, communication skills, and problem solving skills but these are all in their own individual categories and have quite a bit of information on each. I personally feel it might be time consuming to go through these as a class although I believe it would be good for extra resources outside of the class. One exception to these categories is the time management toolkit which does satisfy a learning objective in the Life Transitions 20/30 curriculum.
What is the Time Management Toolkit?
The time management toolkit provides a variety of information, resources, and an assessment to test your time management skills. I would like to focus specifically on the time management assessment page called “How good is your time management?” This page provides an assessment for the viewer to complete. Once completed, this test provides the viewer with a score and a description along with it. As well, there are a few links to accompany this assessment to help the individual who took the test improve their time management skills.
What do I like about it?
- User friendly.
- Easy to understand questions.
- Variety of options to answer questions.
- If someone were to score very low, the results are worded in a way that they are encourage the student to try to improve their skills.
- Explains which questions tested which time management skill.
- Doesn’t just end with an assessment, it provides links to help improve skill.
- At the bottom it provides a quick write up about why having time management skills is important.
- Must complete every question before you can get a score (this ensures you get an accurate score and don’t end up getting a lower score do to this).
- The questions are categorized according to components of time management skills. On the more important skills, there are more questions and with the least important, they have fewer questions (affects the weight of each category and thus the overall score).
What do I dislike about it?
One flaw about this resource is that you don’t know how much each question is weighted. I assume that each question is weighted the same (3 points each) because there are 15 questions and the most points you can get is 75 (and 15×3=75). However, I don’t really know this is a fact because it doesn’t state it anywhere.
Other than that, I can’t think of anything else that I don’t like about this resource. I think it’s quite accurate (at least how I evaluate my own time management skills) and it encourages and offers improvement.
Where does this fit into the curriculum and how would I use it?
This fits under the Life Transitions 20/30 curriculum in Level A of the fourth module. The learning objective (pg 133) that this resource specifically fits with is the first which states: “Students will acquire and evaluate information in order to: assess their current level of time management.” Before the students do the assessment, they can read and evaluate the components that make up time management skills and then rate themselves (if each question is in fact out of three marks, they would be able to determine their score according to the test since the test provides which questions correspond to which skill). Once they have assessed their own time management skills, they can then take the test and compare the results with the score that they gave themselves.
This also does fit into the second point of Level A in this module (pg 133). The learning objective states: “students will acquire and evaluate information in order to: outline effective time management techniques.” In the results section where it lists the components of time management skills, they also provide links for improvement in these areas. Here, students can read the articles and jot down the time management techniques provided. If you wanted to do this at the same time as the first point in Level A, you could get the students to evaluate themselves, then take the test, then they could go through each recommended article and outline each of the techniques listed.
In Level B of this same module (pg 133), the first two points state: “Students will: state a personal time management challenge; and list strategies (alternatives to meet their time management challenge.” By taking the test on this page, students will be able to identify which component of time management that they are having challenges with and then they could explore the recommended resources to help meet their time management challenge.
Evaluation of Mind Tools.
Overall, Mind Tools is a very informative site with great resources and quizzes. It is user friendly and is engaging to its viewers. I would definitely use this website in my classroom if I had to test student’s leadership, team management, communication, and time management skills. If not, this would be a great resource to provide my students for extra information outside of the class.
If I had to give it a numerical value, I would give the test a 9.5/10 and the actual website a 8/10.
Ashley McMurchy 