30 Web Tools in 30 Minutes

Dean Shareski from Prairie South School District in Saskatchewan prepared this slide show of 30 Web Tools in 30 Minutes for an IT meeting. There are some great recommendations here! 30 for 30

View more presentations from Dean Shareski.

7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers

Today from Mashable, 7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers.

The possibilities for social media tools in the classroom are vast. In the hands of the right teacher, they can be used to engage students in creative ways, encourage collaboration and inspire discussion among even soft-spoken students. But we’ve already made our case for why teachers should consider using social media in their classrooms. What about the how?

What fantastic tools are you using?

Sign Up Genius

Last week John Goldsmith posted about Sign Up Genius, a free online tool for creating and managing group sign up lists. This is one of those tools that you don't know you need until it exists! As someone who is always has projects on the go that involve organizing volunteers and planning events -- from sporting events to conferences -- these sign up templates will certainly come in handy.  And what a perfect way for students to manage the details of group projects!

This Habitat for Humanity sign up sheet nicely illustrates how it works:

Screenjelly - What's on your screen?

Stephen Downes mentioned Screenjelly on his blog this week. It's a quick and easy way to share what's on your screen. The recording is limited to 3 minutes which forces you to be concise -- not a bad thing! :-) There are many obvious educational uses for this tool.

Screenjelly records your screen activity with your voice so you can spread it via Twitter or email. Use it to quickly share cool apps or software tips, report a bug, or just show stuff you like. To start recording, click on the red button. No need to install or download anything!

Ediscio

Wendy McElroy from Camosun College gave a shout out about this tool via Twitter as one of the fun Web 2.0 tools she wants to try. Ediscio is a free service for creating and sharing flashcards online. Ediscio is useful for individuals and for studying in groups. You can also share your cardboxes with others. Here is a list of main features:

• Create and share flashcards online
• Work collaboratively on flashcard sets
• Enrich flashcards by images (upload), videos, and LaTeX-based math formulas, and many text formatting possibilities (Word-like interface)
• Automatic, customizable learning schedule according to Leitner system
• Query modes which help focusing on weak spots
• Query options include swapping of question and answer, and an automatic comparison mode
• Learning statistics as tag-cloud, based on keywords which are assigned to flashcards
• Visualization of learning progress as a diagram
• Long-term statistics and after each learning session
• Rights management for each cardbox
• Catalog of all cardboxes which are configured for public access
• Import, export, (XLS, CSV, Html) and print flashcards
• Social network features like making friends, mail; and automatically finding experts for specific keywords among friends
• Classroom features which help a teacher to assign cardboxes to a whole class
• Newsfeed about activities in cardboxes of class
• Learning statistics which relate to a whole class

A.nnotate.com

John Goldsmith aka @detools brought our attention this morning to a new service called A.nnotate.

A.nnotate is an online annotation, collaboration and indexing system for documents and images, supporting PDF and MS Office formats. Instead of emailing different versions of a document back and forth you can now all comment on a single read-only copy online. Unlike online word processors, the document is displayed in high quality with fonts and layout just like the printed version. It is easy to use and runs in all common web browsers, with no software or plugins to install.

This tool has a number of uses from individual knowledge management (what you write in the margins as you read) to collaborative projects.

Read It Later

Looking for ways to manage your work flow better? Kathreen Riel suggests Read It Later, a tool for creating a list of items you come across on the web but need to defer reading until later.

List of web 2.0 tools for instruction

This article and list of tools comes via Tony Bates' blog: Do you have experience using these tools in teaching?

Lloyd, M. (2010) 18 Web 2.0 tools for instruction Campus Technology, April 28
This very useful article asks two experts, Sarah Robbins (aka Intellagirl), of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington, and Mark Frydenberg of Bentley University, to pick their favourite web 2.0 tools for instruction. Here’s their choices (read the article to find out why, and how they’ve used them):
Sara:

• Magma
• Flook
• Sidewiki
• UStream Mobile
• Thwapr
• Jing

Mark

• Delicious, Diigo, and Twine
• Screentoaster
• Doodle
• CoverItLive
• WolframAlpha
• Dimdim

Nine Tools for Collaboratively Creating Mind Maps

This is an excellent overview of tools for collaboratively creating mind maps from the Free Technology for Teachers blog.

Mind maps or graphic organizers can be invaluable tools for visual thinkers and visual learners. The process of creating a mind map can help students gain an overview perspective on complex, multifaceted concepts. Mind maps can also help students outline an essay or story they're planning to write. The following list contains nine tools that can be used by students to create mind maps independently or collaboratively.

This list is of particular interest in light of the current Tools for Collaborating Online seminar discussion at SCoPE. There is a discussion on mind maps underway now. (Newcomers and latecomers are always welcomed in SCoPE discussions.) 

Screencasts with Screenr

Screenr is VERY easy to use! Click record and off you go creating a screencast up to 5 minutes in length. There is nothing to download and it is free.

Here is an example created by Amanda Coolidge, Communication Chair for the BC Educational Technology Users Group, to highlight upcoming activities. Through the Screenr site Amanda published a link to her screencast directly to Twitter.

SynchTube Beta : Watch Videos With Friends in Real Time

Nik Peachy tweeted about synchtube this morning, so I thought I'd try it out. This is a specific need I've had in the past as an online facilitator -- how to have a conversation while viewing/analysing video clips. This simple tool works very well!

From the synchtube beta site:

Watch Videos With Friends in Real Time: "Simply paste a YouTube link and create a room. You can share this room with others, and watch videos in real-time... well enough talking, just try it already!

Wordpress Multi-User

Ever dream of running hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress? WordPress MU, or multi-user, is designed to do exactly that.

Several post-secondary institutions in British Columbia are using WordPress MU -- UBC, UNBC, Langara, Camosun... (I've missed some, I'm sure.) What's interesting is to see WordPress MU being used for for variety of purposes. We think of it as blogging software, but in fact it is a very flexible content management system (CMS) and is being used at these institutions for developing professional e-portfolios (see UBC's Faculty of Education e-portfolios for teacher candidates), maintaining department websites (see Langara's iweb), and managing course content and discussions. In fact Clint Lalonde from Camusun has begun to document the process of piloting WordPress MU at Camosun College, and he offers this advice about referring to WordPress MU as a blogging tool:

I’ve avoided using the word blog when I refer to these sites. I’ve found that the term blog carries with it preconceived notions, both good and bad. So, in order to avoid the whole “I don’t want a blog, I want a website” circular logic wheel that I have witnessed when people talk about WP as a CMS, I have been using the term website when talking about our pilot sites.

Stopwatch

Stopwatch: Would you like to know how long it takes to load a webpage? This program will measure the time for you. Enter the URL to be measured and watch the top of the window.

Gliffy

Gliffy is a fantastic tool for everything from planning how to organize the furniture in your classroom to collaboratively brainstorming and organizing ideas. Thanks to Grant Potter for introducing us to this tool during a working group meeting to rethink and redesign the Educational Technology Users Group community. Here's our spidergram (taken from this spidergram activity).

At Gliffy, we believe that communicating with visuals gets people to the same space a lot faster because a picture takes the thoughts in your head and makes them tangible.

With a tool that makes it easy to create, share, and collaborate on a wide range of diagrams, Gliffy users can communicate more clearly, boost innovation, improve decisions, and work more effectively.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave: "The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave, and follow us on Twitter for updates and Wave tips."

16 Apps That Make Sharing Large Files A Snap

This blog post got my attention because it was tweeted by @clintlalonde and bookmarked by Scott Leslie. It comes up quite often that we need to exchange large files with others. This list will help to zone in on the service that suits your purpose.

16 Apps That Make Sharing Large Files A Snap: "In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services. I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . .

Most of the services suggested require no registration. None of them will ask you to download anything to your computer, and all of them are easy to use, and worth using."

EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing

Used Etherpad http://bit.ly/xOXdr today in class with 50+ students for classwide brainstorming - worked brilliantly


ETUG member, Grant Potter, tweets some success with EtherPad today. It looks like a very useful and robust tool for the classroom or any type of group collaboration.

EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.

When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

New Google Form Features

Google Forms now supports branching http://bit.ly/ayCRW



I saw this tweet from ETUG member, Clint Lalonde, this morning and jumped on it! I've always loved the ease of Google Forms, but it has always been a bare bones solution. The Official Google Docs Blog reports two new features.

Have you ever wanted to create a form that changes which questions to show next based on an answer received earlier in the form? The two features we launched today make that easy. First, we've added one of the most requested features for forms: page breaks. Now it is easy to create a form with multiple pages by going to 'Add item' and selecting 'Page break.'

We've also added another highly requested feature, logic branching. Once you've created a form with multiple pages, you can select 'Go to page based on answer' to control the flow of your form based on the user's answers. For example, you can create a form asking the person to select their language and then direct them to a form in the correct language.

Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day: Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 - August Update

Jane Hart's Top 10 Tools August 2009 list is now available. Here is the snapshot. This website is not only an excellent way to quickly find tools that meet the needs of your task at hand, but the process for compiling and ranking the top tools is also interesting. What are your Top 10 tools for 2009? We'll be watching for your name on the list of learning professionals who have shared their lists. :-)

Deep Linking in YouTube

I received this tip from Grant Potter via twitter. It looks like the YouTube deep linking feature has been available for awhile, but it's new to me! This is ideal for integrating video into online discussions. 

YouTube Blog: "'deep link' to YouTube videos. This means you can now not only link to a YouTube video itself, but you can also link directly to a specific time within each video. This is something you have been asking us for and we are happy to deliver."