3- Kahoot:
Kahoot is a good website for creating fun learning games that suits adults and children. You can make a series of multiple choice questions. One can add videos, images and diagrams to the questions to engage the participants.

4- Prezi:
Prezi is a unique tool that allows students and teachers to prepare presentation with special visual effects since a big percentage of the information people take in comes through the eyes. in short, Prezi allows the user to make engaging, persuasive, and memorable presentations.

5- Google Drive:

Google drive is a great place to create and upload resources within to share among students or certain groups. Google drive also includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, etc.


6- Zoom:
Zoom is great when one is teaching group sessions as it includes voice and video call, and one can share their screen, and you can record calls automatically within Zoom.

7- Moodle:

Moodle is great for online education as it is educational open-source software tools. It allows to create electronic platform for communication between students and educators. It facilitates also the engagement between them since it allows for files sharing and to build a solid network of people for online education possibilities.

8- Wisemapping:
Wisemapping is a free online mind mapping software to create and share mind maps. It helps to create high-quality mind maps for students and educators. The mind maps created can be linked to pages and blogs. They can be shared among friends and colleagues.

When I started researching for activities to be used by the association, the process was a tricky one for several reasons. First, since I was brought up in the Middle East, I had to first unlearn most of what I learnt about LGBT+ people and educate myself again with the right knowledge in order to work for their case and rights. Unfortunately, there is a lot of wrong information about the LGBT+ community in the Middle East since they do not have the chance to speak out or come out due to real threats of imprisonment or physical harmness. However, when I got the chance to travel abroad and learn more about this community and deal with many of them on the personal level, I started to realize the wrong conceptions that my conservative community taught me. Second, I was not very familiar with the Estonian context and the type of difficulties that LGBT+ people face here, so, I had to get in contact with the locals and learn more about the daily hardships LGBT+ people go through in Estonia. This step was very important since one needs to understand the context and how the locals think in order to know how to address them and convince them.

Our main task that was assigned to my classmate, Amelia, and I was to search for activities and information related to certain topics. Our supervisor gave us a month time to come up with the results and make a PowerPoint presentation to present our findings. The process of the research was a very interesting and informing to me. It taught me a lot about myself and the way I work. It was not a very smooth process; I can say that it had ups and downs and thus I will be reflecting on the process and how it went. Our placement supervisors were very flexible with us and gave us complete freedom to follow any research methods. This flexibility was very advantageous for me and Amelia since it allowed us to work on this task with great flexibility especially with our hectic and busy academic schedule that we have in Tallinn. I remember that I used to work on the task when I was on buses or trains. I even once took advantage of the 3-hour-trip I made in a cruise from Tallinn to Helsinki to search for materials and activities. Also, this rigorous research on topics related to the LGBT+ community benefited me on the personal level since I leant a lot especially on the level of genetic and biological differences and similarities between non-straight and straight people. Having the chance to read different academic and medical papers related to the biological and genetic claim that gays are born that way, corrected many miscoceptions I had about gays and non-straight people. In addition, working with the Estonian LGBT Association gave me the chance to befriend non-straight people and bound with them on the personal level. 

 

On the other hand, this researching process faced some obstacles that I had to deal with. My biggest obstacle was time management and to keep rearranging my timetable to fit my constantly changing academic schedule (university classes). Having classes on different days and times every week was a challenge for me since I perform the best when I have a fixed routine. Another obstacle I had to deal with was the language barrier. Since I was searching about information related to the Estonian context, I came across many websites that discussed the problems of the LGBT+ community were in Estonian which I do not understand at all. Although I tried to translate the texts on “Google Translate”, the translation was not very helpful and the translated texts did not make a lot of sense. 

 

To conclude, this research process was very enlightening for me. It taught me more about myself and how I perform the best. It pushed me to learn more about the Estonian society and make local Estonian friends. I can definitely say that I learnt a lot about the topics I researched and from the obstacles I faced as well.