Study Tools

About TA Student

This site contains resources primarily aimed at Transactional Analysis trainees. I am myself in Advanced Training and wanted to bring together all the online resources that exist to support my own learning.

I also publish the The Psychotherapy Daily which brings together significant developments in psychotherapy published on Twitter in the past day.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, strokes or requests, please email me at:rob@vantol.co.uk or tweet to @talkingtherapy.

To defy the costs of producing this site, I am referrer for Amazon.co.uk, how give me a small percentage from their profits for each book you buy - it does not in any way affect the price you pay for the books.

Note Taking: OneNote vs EverNote (+ Together)

If you're a TA student you will be taking reams and reams of notes. Yes, pencil and paper is tried and trusted, but going back to these notes is always problematic.

If you have a recent copy of Microsoft Office you have OneNote (and if you're on a Masters university course, you can buy it for next to nothing at Software4Students using your university email address). I particularly like its ability to store anything (include voice) in a nice filing cabinet metaphor. Mac users should take a look at Together as a note taking solution.
Alternatively, you might consider EverNote. This majors on mutli-device, so you can take notes with your laptop and smartphone and work desktop PC and it will be all nicely synced together.

Mind Mapping

If you have a visual learning style, mind mapping your notes can be a very powerful way of organising your thoughts. Try one of these - they're all good. Just depends which style of mind map and user interface you like best.

Freeplane | The daddy of free mind mapping tools.
XMind | Free mind mapping tool with paid for extras if you get keen.
Bubbl.us | Cloud based brainstorming and mind mapping.

Research and Bibliography Tools

You can use Microsoft Word to manage your bibliography, or you use specialist tools, such as:
EasyBib | Online storage of your bibliography
Zotero | [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.
Crossref | the official DOI® link registration agency for scholarly publications with citation-link searching.

Specialist Sources

Your training institute or university library is your first port of call, especially if you have an Athens account. Middlesex University do a nice guide to it's psychotherapy resources. Your university will probably have something similar, or go talk to the librarians.
Access to TA Journals will be essential
Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Research give good searches of academic journals
Google Books often gives you relevant snippets of books
PsychWeb is an interesting curator of web-based psychology information

Peer Reviewed Open Access Online Journals

Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy

Transactional Analysis Student