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.'

Aims of this blog

This blog won't be wordy ... just a place for me to store technology sites I've found interesting and wish to share with others.