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.'