This week we've looked at so many awesome tools that will be useful to me, especially in my work life. We looked at Twitter, Google+, Weebly, Diigo & Delicious and podcasting/screencasting tools.
A couple of weeks ago I setup my Twitter account (onegall) and begin following people. I am following my fellow classmates and other educators that have great and interesting things to say. I really like this tool for gathering and finding articles and resources to stay current on educational and technology tools/research/issues/topics.
Google+ is an evolving thing for me. I recently began using just Google Chrome as my browser and am finding that using Google products does seem to make things more integrated and a little easier for me. I just need to spend a little more time to see how I can use all these resources.
I recently started setup a Weebly site to gather great websites that I think can be beneficial to other teachers in my school. I am working to organize them into logical groups, and add my notes about these resources. I will keep adding resources as I learn about them through Twitter, blogs, etc.
Social bookmarking......I tried this with Delicious a couple of years ago, but it never amounted to too much. So, I decided to start over with Diigo. I really like the sticky note feature and how I can find what others are bookmarking based on similar tags we both use.
I was excited to try my hand at a screencast. At school we have a new student management tool and I wanted to create easy-to-follow instructions on some basic functionality that all teachers will need to become familiar with. I used Yodio to create a short how-to screencast. The cool part was that I added the audio via the phone! This will be great for when I don't have access to a microphone. I tried my hand at Screenr, but it does not appear that I can make the screencast private. Since I am using my account for the how-to, I didn't like that my picture/bio/login-name would be out there for all to see. Some of the other tools (Vocaroo and JingProject) required me to download software to my laptop, which I'm not interested in doing. If I were to use this with students, it would be too much s/w management to download the s/w and keep it current. What tools have my classmates tried? Which do you prefer?
So, the most fun and useful thing this week was the screencast tools. This is something I've been meaning to investigate and having it as an assignment just popped it to the top of my list! Creating how-to screencasts (screen shots + audio) is quick and easy and I hope the teachers will find them helpful!
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