Change, underestimated?

New video posted on you tube from the folks at common craft a very good explanation of how to set up and why to set up del.icio.us or any social bookmarking service.

Soundsnap is a site where you can find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. For a more extensive library you can check out The Hollywood Edge which has some free samples. These are great for movies and powerpoint/keynotes.

Thanks to Paul Wilkinson for this one.

technorati tags: audio soundsnap

KoolWire is a new and wonderful email based file conversion service to help you convert your Microsoft Word (.doc), Powerpoint (.ppt), Excel Spreadsheets (.xls) or even pictures into Adobe PDF documents. 
Just compose a new email message, attach document(s) that have to be converted into PDF and send the email to pdf@koolwire.com. The PDF file(s) should arrive in your inbox the next moment.

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for this.

So which web 2.0 tools are any good? and what is web 2.0 anyway? According to wikipedia web 2.0 is a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, it refers to a perceived second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis and communication tools —that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.

This cartoon comes from toondoo a site which is free to register on like most web 2.0 sites and allows you to drag and drop cartoon characters, really quite simple especially for people such as myself who are artistically challenged. Some of the other sites I use and are worth having a look at are:

Flickr: A photo sharing site. Very handy for field trips and putting multiple photos on moodle as you can select a bunch at once. There are a lot of options on how you want to share the photos as well. The site is also usable as a resource with many of the photos being copyright free and you can download them in any size you wish.

Webnote: This is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace. You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.

(The reason why this is indented and in italics is because it is a direct quote from webnote)

The other really useful feature is the web 2.0 homepage. Netvibes, myyahoo, googlehome, Pageflakes and Favoor etc. what these do is allow you to have all of your important information in one place. Emails, news , weather, search, bookmarks, to do lists and Calendars, in fact the list continues. The only downfall of this is the speed of the internet here in NZ which means on some connections it is a bit slow loading up but give it a try and see if it works for you.

Not really web 2.0 but very much about professional learning and collaboration is Slideshare. Slideshare allows you to view any one of several thousand slideshows and get ideas to use in your own Powerpoints.

One week of school to go so here is a link to another teacher video, Animal School.

Yes not quite as exciting as as the next installment of CSI but what browser you use does have quite an effect on your internet experience. At present around 68% of people use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). Largely this is because it comes pre-installed on your computer and people never see any point in changing. Strange when we all like different colours or cars that we should stick with one browser. So what are your choices and why should you change.

The main competitor of IE is Firefox which like most browsers is free and available to download here. While the latest update to IE does allow tabbed browsing (that’s where rather than opening up a dozen windows in the task bar allows you to see them across the top of the browser, this is very handy for research and starting off lessons) it doesn’t allow you to have access to any of the free add ins. These allow you to add features such as download tools (for taking copies of YouTube) to Del.icio.us bookmarks. The easiest of these to use is Download Helper which copies any flash file to your computer. These files can then be played using FLV player 1.3.3 There are of course other options in browser such as

Safari and Camino(mac only)

Opera , Maxthon and Flock (thanks to Allanahk for the suggestion now I may need to change my opinion again :-))

So there you have it, try something different.

Over the past week my knowledge of web 2.0 tools has been increasing exponentially. I have been really impressed with some of the tools out there and hope to be able to share a lot of these resources with both the staff of Katmat and others.

I have been particularly impressed with netvibes which I now use as my homepage. The ability to have your rss feeds, all search engines and e mails in one place is very cool.

For those of you wondering about what Web 2.0 is the following you tube gives a bit of an indication of where the net is heading.

The other tool I am really pushing is del.icio.us this bookmark service allows you to share bookmarks with other teachers and thus stop the endless trawling through the internet looking for resources and lesson plans.

Now with all these tools I suppose the real challenge is to think how can they be used to motivate students and improve teaching and learning.