The Top Five Tools to Learn by Fall

After finishing up our hands-on session for Camtasia last week, we are preparing our next session of LLL, which if you have been following my blog, you know is a session of Lunch with Loretta & Lori. This one will be a very exciting session entitled "The Top Five Tools to Learn by Fall". In this session the three of us will pitch in to demonstrate to faculty how to use these five free, cool tools to either engage students or make their classroom (or either faculty or student lives) more manageable and interesting,

• Pinterest
  Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website. Users can create and manage themed image boards and add media found online using the “Pin It” button or upload media from their computer. A pin can be a picture, a video, a discussion, or a monetary gift.
• bubbl.us
  Bubbl.us is an online collaborative brainstorming tool that allows you to create colorful mind maps to print and share with others. Does not require registration to use this free tool.
• de.li.cio.us
  Use this social bookmarking website to search for bookmarks of interest to you. If you have create an account, you can add bookmarks your own bookmarks where they will be stored for quick access from from any computer. On del.icio.us, you can use tags (keywords) to organize and remember your bookmarks. They will be accessible to anyone entering the tag.
• Doodle
  Doodle eliminates the chaos of scheduling and saves you a lot of time and energy when you’re trying to find a time to bring a number of people together. Doodle enables you to propose several dates and times and the participants can indicate their availability online. Doodle is free and doesn't require you to register.
• Snipping Tool - Microsoft Office
  Microsoft's snipping tool allows you to "snip" any object on your screen or capture a screen shot. You can then annotate, save, and/or share the image.
  
  
  PS. If I forget to tell you, I look forward to our next session of LLL which is coming in April, where I get to watch Lori and Amanda show us how to best use Google search.

Polling tools are EVERYWHERE!!!

Well it looks like I have been busy! Somehow I missed the last couple of months while I was teaching about technology instead of writing about it! No matter, here is my latest reflection: Polling tools are EVERYWHERE! And that includes polleverywhere.com a free tool that can be used by every student who owns a cell phone (and, who doesn't these days?) Amanda covered this cool tool during our mash ups session of Lunch with Loretta and Lori last fall. 


Then the other day when we were planning our spring sessions of LLL and Amanda suggested she could demo http://www.socrative.com/ during our "Top 5 Tools to Learn by Fall " session. Sounded good to me and I had some time so I was able to test it out with my laptop and smartphone, it's works with an ipad or a plain old computer as well, it's a simple tool that is completely free for student and teachers and it works great-so I am done right? Wrong!


One day later, one of my co-workers shared http://www.tophatmonocle.com/, (yet another polling tool) which she thought was more reasonably priced than the paid version of polleverywhere.com. The pricing is pretty good for the tools it offers but it is more like a polling tool on steroids. I would call it a maybe as I would polleverywhere.com


Now where am I going with this? Amanda again! Just a day later she sends me an email with this link http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/02/11-web-based-polling-and-survey-tools.html to nearly a dozen more free polling tools! Now I have no time to write again...