TokBox

If you're looking for different ways of communicating with colleagues and/or students you might be interested in a free tool called TokBox. TokBox allows you to send video messages and to use software to have video chats (as an alternative to booking video conferencing). Students could also use this to carry out collaborative work.

Survey Monkey

This is a very easy to use tool to create sophisticated on-line surveys. And, we have a license to use it at CELE. It is a fantastic way to collect a lot of data very painlessly. If you want to use it, ask me or John Rabone.

Websitepulse

Trying to figure out which sites are available in Ningbo isn't easy. For example, over the weekend our Ning site was available for 20 or so hours, then not for a few hours and finally was available again. Which sites are available in China is, in most cases, very ad hoc - Shanghai can access a site but Beijing can't and so on. One day a site available the next it isn't!
In order to find out whether our Ning or any other site is available in China I suggest you use http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html:

Copy and paste the URL of the website you wish to access

As you can see above the CELE Ning is available in China (Shanghai). As you can see below my blog on technology isn't ...

Hypertext Builder

This must be one of the most unattractive sites but it is very useful fro students. Briefly, you can copy and paste text into a text box. The programme then creates a hypertext version of the text. Every word of your text is now clickable. If you click on a word you can get a definition, concordance lines and collocations.

Eureka

The University of Nottingham are piloting a new  peer support/social networking tool for students. It is a space where students can create groups and ask/answer peer questions. It looks basic and easy to use. I think that this type of site would be of great value to the insessional team in their efforts to reach a wider audience and meet diverse learning and literacy needs.

Zotero

Here's a  referencing tool which is much better and more flexible than end notes. It is free, easy to use and is web-based. Here's what Zotero say about their tool:

'Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote) — the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways...'

Blackle

If you're interested in doing your (tiny) bit to save energy why not use Blackle instead of Google? Here's why:
"Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen."

VocabGrabber

VocabGrabber is another innovative vocab tool that will help students understand and learn new words in a visually attractive manner. this is what they say about their product:


'VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save.

Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action.'

Penzu

This is such a simple piece of technology. You type in your thoughts or reflections, add some photos if you wish and save. It is the best and easiest site I've seen for students or teachers to keep an easy-to-use private or shared learning journal.

Prezi

Prezi is an online presentation tool. I really like it, it is much much more sophisticated than PowerPoint, you can do much more with it and it looks a lot better. The way it organises information couldn't be more different than PowerPoint. Frankly, it makes PowerPoint look primative. You should have a look at it and I'd suggest you start using it with students.

XERTE toolkits

Martha has been creating material using Xerte. This has resulted in an impressive array of interactive materials which are quite easy to produce (once you've experimented with the different options and tools).




This is what she says:


'Here's a sample unit from the distance PGCTEAP course, which I produced with the help of 'Xerte Toolkits', a program developed by the Learning Team at Nottingham.


Please click here to have a look:


It's easy to use and the Learning Team have recently produced a series of tutorials and docs. to guide users.


If you'd like me to talk to you about this program or show you how to produce material, let me know.

WriteWith

WriteWith is a great tool for collaborative writing. Much easier to use than google docs, very intuitive and easy to manage. You can track changes to documents very easily and you can also set deadlines for submission of documents.

Concordancer

This concordancer which I developed in collaboration with the learning team is freely available to you and all students on WebCT. (CELE - Online Writing)

Key in a word as follows:

You can sort the collocations by using the slider as the bottom of the tool. You can sort up to two places to the left and right:

You can obtain paragraph context information by clicking on any of the concordance lines

You can also get definitions of words:

You can also find out the frequency of any given word (AWL and GSL):

There are numerous functions not mentioned such as part-of-speech search, adding collocations to a notebook ...

If you're interested in using this ... get in touch 

Youtube downloader

This software is really useful for downloading videos as well as converting formats.

'YouTube Downloader is software that allows you to download videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and many others and convert them to other video formats.The program is easy to use, just specify the URL for the video you want to download and click the Ok button! It also allows you to convert downloaded to convert downloaded videos for Ipod, Iphone, PSP, Cell Phone, Windows Media, XVid and MP3.'

Google Docs

If you don't use it already, I'd encourage you to set up a google docs account. You can upload documents and share them. If you have a PowerPoint you can use google docs to share them too, as I have done below. Students and teachers can collaborate and share when writing and presenting. You can get a URL so that anyone you select can access your document. Click here to see an example.

Phonetic Transcriber

Richard pointed this site out ... very easy to use and a god-send to teachers like me

Wordsift

This is an excellent site for teaching vocab.

Teacher development

A really good site for developing your teaching and technology skills

TinyURL

Some URLs are incredibly long and complicated. You can easily create a much shortened URL by going to tinyurl

Audacity - audio editing

If you need to edit digital audio recordings the best software you can find for free is audacity

Visual Thesaurus

The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. Its innovative display encourages exploration and learning. It really is very very good.

Mindmeister

Mindmeister is a really easy to use collaborative mindmapping tool.

Robin Good has used it to map all the best collaborative tools - have a look at here

If you'd like a very comprehensive list of technology tools available click here

Bubbl

If you'd like a simple tool for brainstorming ideas with students bubbl is very easy to use and a lot of fun too.

SimplyBox

Simplybox is a brilliant tool for taking information and images from a website and storing them online or using them in other documents. You can tag what you save, modify images and link to the original website you took it from. Much better way to organise your bookmarks.

Wordle

Wordle 'Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.'