With our imminent switch to google apps for education I am excited by the fact that we will be able to quickly and easily share documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and wiki’s.
John Goldsmith: recent winner of Premier’s Excellence Award for Teaching did a presentation about various tools that I’ve listed below. Here are some of the links and his thoughts.
Many amazing products are available online for free (google apps for education)
His blog (also wordpress 😉 ) detools.ca
Having problems converting docx files? Try Cometdocs (free and you do not need to register for documents less than three pages) Can convert pdf’s, docx etc
Personal email? Don’t do it on the company time or their email! (I agree strongly)… use gmail.com for your private email.
100 sources for free stock images http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/100-legal-sources-for-free-stock-images/
Having the right tool for the job in technology is the same as for construction, plumbing etc. You can do the job right in 5 minutes or bang your head against the wall for hours. The nice thing with technology is that a lot of the tools are free now and you don’t need to visit the hardware or rental store.
Clickspeak – add on to firefox that easiyl allows you to read highlighted text. Good for differentiated instruction, iep etc.
Meeting TV – another free tool (whoever creates room must have an account) – tool description: meeting24.tv is a web conference system for up to 24 users for 24/7.
It’s free. No collaboration tools like elluminate but nice for F2F
Skrbl – shared whiteboard, no audio
http://bubbl.us online mindmapping tool, again free!
http://exploratree.org.uk/ mind mapping, diagram tools, great SWOT or BackCasting diagrams – great for planning with templates
A great secret to teaching with technology is what is plan B or plan C when plan A fails.
Lots more on his pre-conference page at http://www.detools.ca/?page_id=1684