List of favourite web tools

List of favourite free web tools

Writing tools

Google Docs – good for online document storage, collaborative writing, off-site backup


Evernote - note-taking facility available via mobile, online and offline with synchronization available between any installation / version

Scribd -
share documents which are automatically converted so they can be
downloaded as Word, Adobe pdf or .txt files / can be embedded in HTML
pages

Wordle – useful for analysis of a topic or issue

Zoho - full suite of tools from Office-type word processors to note-taking and project management tools. Free option available on most tools.

Blogging / RSS / Collaboration

Blogger - good, free blogging service from Google

DimDim - free web conferencing / web-hosted online, open-source meeting tool

Drop.io - instantly create collaborative working spaces, private, no account necessary, shareable outputs, easy to use.

Google Reader - full-featured RSS aggregator with good integration into other Google services

WordPress
- another blog service, but is slightly more 'professional' looking and
the ability to view stats on blog postings is also useful

WetPaint - free wiki with plenty of templates and features

Video / audio

Jing - web-based screencasting tool, create screen captures, narrated video etc.

quietube - view or share YouTube videos without distracting comments and other YouTube branding

ScreenToaster – create and record video to create screencasts or tutorials

SlideShare - useful for hosting PowerPoint slides to share / embed, also good for linking in MP3 files to easily create a slidecast

Xtranormal - create 3D videos by selecting characters and inputting the script. Sharable video output.

YouTube - video sharing site with lots of creative commons licenced resources / facility for comment / closed captioning

Social Networking

Facebook - major social networking site, useful for both personal and business networks / use of groups for students etc

LinkedIn - similar to Facebook, but with a more professional feel

Twitter – microblogging tool, useful for concise communication, resource-sharing, networking, discussion, current affairs / breaking news

Diagramming

Exploratree
- from Futurelab this is an online ideas tool, a little like
mindmapping but with other types of 'thinking' diagram templates
available

Gliffy - creates flow charts, organisational charts, plans etc in the style of Microsoft Visio and can support collaborative working

MindMeister - mindmapping tool, allows users to create up to 6 mindmaps for free and export in various formats including jpg, rtf etc

ProjectDraw - CAD-like online drawing tool

Skrbl - free, shareable online collaborative whiteboard. 

Image editing

Flickr - online photo sharing (plus tagging, commenting and annotating) and photography-related discussion forums / community

Picnik - online image editing with links to popular image-hosting sites such as Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook etc

Miscellaneous / Utilities

Box.net - online file storage service

Doodle - meeting scheduling tool

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe - does what it says! Put in a URL to check whether or not a site is down or it's just you having problems.

How Do I? - search Google for tutorials on any subject

Media Convert - convert files from one format to another using this free tool

Read The Words - create MP3 audio files from text input with a variety of voices and speeds to select

Overuse of metrics to judge research criticised

The president of the British Academy has warned against the government's plans to judge research using statistical analysis alone saying it risks producing "unintelligent forms of accountability".Much greater use of "metrics", such as research income, student numbers, publications and how much research is cited by other researchers, to judge the quality of research in UK universities is due to be introduced after this year's research assessment exercise.

Overuse of metrics to judge research criticised | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk

Interesting article poss relevant to qualitative vs. quantitative validity debate

Blogged with the Flock Browser

What's del.icio.us today...

Links for 2008-02-27 [del.icio.us] Posted: 28 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Fearful schools banning staff from touching children | News crumb | EducationGuardian.co.uk "Researchers found current practice regarding touching to be confused, contradictory, based on staff rather than child protection, contrary to known best practice regarding child development, increasingly contested and not required by legislation"

Litigation in the nursery?

Kinda Learning Stuff: "Why do people do this? When did they forget they were dealing with children and prioritise hyper-protective practices above meeting their needs? Education, education, education = litigation, litigation, litigation?!"

Blog entry made on my Kinda Learning site which is E891 relevant because it touches on the dissemination of research and also the misappropriation of guidelines in education. Worth remembering

What's del.icio.us today...

Links for 2008-02-25 [del.icio.us] Posted: 26 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST "Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism * News * Technology * Intellectual property Series: Digital rights, digital wrongs Who Is This Person? :: Firefox Add-ons Could be so useful for helping to critically evaluate web sources during web research Smaller class sizes 'less effective' Interesting article which touches on the way in which research is disseminated to and by teachers

What's del.icio.us today...

Links for 2008-02-22 [del.icio.us] Posted: 23 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Wealthy 'thrive at poor schools' So... family background is more important than selection of school... who knew...

Trust no-one... well, do... but trust yourself more!

The web is your hard drive -- but it's an unreliable hard drive | Technology | Guardian Unlimited: "Bear this in mind when the next snake-oil salesman does a pitch for 'cloud computing'. Sure, you can let somebody else take responsibility for the safety and security of your data, but only if you don't mind losing it."

Useful reminder about why it's good to use the web 2.0 services that are out there... but relying on them for 100% uptime and for complete reliability of data storage is a mistake. Just as with learning out to manage our digital identity is a skill modification we need to get to grips with, so are issues of data storage, ownership and management. If you want it doing right... don't necessarily do it yourself because there are some fantastic online tools out there. But if you want it doing reliably... make sure you take backups and take responsibility for those backups yourself.

Nothing ever really changes, huh? A slight tweak with the way you do things to take account of differing contexts, and you'll be right.

What's del.icio.us...

Links for 2008-02-20 [del.icio.us] Posted: 21 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Context beats exam tables in search for best schools University dropout steady at 22% Interesting to note because of the attempt to manipulate figures to superficially improve outcomes rather than addressing the real support issue Why do so many students drop out, MPs ask | Students | EducationGuardian.co.uk Student retention and the issues surrounding that and widening participation There is good reason to be worried about declining rates of reading | Comment is free | The Guardian Interesting response to an earlier article about the Dawn of the Digital Natives (also in The Guardian)

Links for 2008-02-18 [del.icio.us] Posted: 19 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Can we teach people to be happy? Interesting seed for a debate on the future of education A third of teachers 'struggle with technology' | E-learning | EducationGuardian.co.uk

What's del.icio.us today...

Links for 2008-02-17 [del.icio.us] Posted: 18 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST JISC : supporting education and research Mind42.com - Collaborative mind mapping in your browser Free online mindmapping which could be extremely useful and compete with the MindMeister version

What's del.icio.us today...

Links for 2008-02-16 [del.icio.us] Posted: 17 Feb 2008 12:00 AM CST Lesson one: no Orwellian language The impact of Orwellian language on the educational environment. One to get the mental juices flowing!

Lesson one: no Orwellian language

BBC NEWS | Education | Lesson one: no Orwellian language: "The need to measure everything and to find equivalents for different types of education arises from a natural enough desire to achieve value-for-money, and to promote different routes for young people.

But it can also be a strait-jacket, implying that all types of learning can, and should, be forced into the same model."

Terrific article about the impact of language in education or rather, the language used to talk about education. Makes you think about the debate surrounding quantitative vs. qualitative methods and which is most appropriate for education. I think that the point is that there are strengths and weaknesses in all things and that by blundering on with scant regard for the weaknesses, focussing only on the strengths matching what you 'need' from education, then the impacts can extend beyond the immediate. Can language really change educational culture? The way it is perceived in general? If we talk about 'delivering', 'facilitating', 'customers' etc when we're describing the educational environment, do we risk forgetting that it's actually about people's development at all and it becomes a tick box, future-employee-producing exercise...

Very thought-provoking.

Simple ideas

LinkBunch BETA - http://linkbun.ch: "A link bunch is just that - a bunch of links"

Aren't simple ideas just great? The ability to shorten and send a bunch of links together. Reading lists in a single URL - done. Collections of resources for research - together. Enthusiastic 'same theme' URLs being shared via several 'tweets' - nope. Just bung them altogether. Pop into LinkBunch and... ping! Done! The Firefox extension looks pretty nifty too)

Oakley on quantitative vs. qualitative methods

Brief biography: "arguing about who does what in terms of methods doesn’t help the work (of social science) get done in the most efficient and appropriate way."

Lovely quote about qualitative vs. quantitative methods from Ann Oakley's biography. Nit-picking the advantages and disadvantages of both forms of research doesn't help get the research job done. Worth remembering!

Is testing too testing?

England young 'among most tested'

Interesting article which raises questions about the way in which schoolchildren are tested in the UK... but it also raises questions about the way in which qualitative and / or quantitative testing affects those within the system. The more measures and standards there are in place, the more testing there is in place to generates the numbers needed. But quantity of education, as another related report notes, is not the be all and end all and it doesn't generate the quality of results desired: "The Primary Review, taking an overview of the evidence, suggests that there is no clear link between quantity and quality in education." (BBC, 2008).

It's a fascinating area. Does insisting that quantitative analysis must be able to be performed in education damage the quality of that education in the long run? Is everyone encouraged to become complicit in a system that just isn't working in the interests of the participants? Would I want my children educated in the UK as it currently stands? Not really...

Fostering the research community

e4innovation.com » Blog Archive » Fostering the research community: "We want the students to “experience” e-learning research, for them to become members of our research community. This fits very much with Wenger’s Community of Practice ideas and his views on identity and constellations of practice. So instead of “dry content” and our views on what e-learning is about, we have designed the course around a series of seminal research papers which encapsulate some of the key features of e-learning research. We want the students to get a feel for the changing nature of e-learning as a research field, the predominant educational theories and perspectives which underpin it and examples of methodological innovation. But many of the students who are likely to take the course will be researchers or practitioners in the field themselves. So we want to ensure that we can capture and build very much on their expertise as well. Soooo to the role of blogs in the course. We will be asking each of the student to keep a reflective research blog as they work through the course and will be encouraging them to read and comment on each others blogs. We want them to experience the role of blogs in a research context and for them to reflect on their own views of how blogging offers a valuable, alternative communication channel for academic discourse."

Poop! Now I wish I was doing the above course to complement E891... ah well!! Worth keeping an eye on this blog to see how the course progresses and whether learning research through experiencing research and reflecting on that experience is a better way of understanding it than the more dry, for want of a better expression(!), E891 traditional-style OU approach.

Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous

BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous: "Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble."

Eeek! You mean I might actually have to do some work when I'm online?!?!?!

Web icon set to be discontinued

Web icon set to be discontinued: "The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users.

Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said.

In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%."

Not really that sorry to say goodbye to something which kind of got its legs tangled in the web of the late 1990s and never quite moved on... but it was the first browser I used and was my first experience of the web. I definitely don't use the web in the same way I did back when Navigator effectively was the web for many people (I no longer have to go make a cuppa cha and pile my way through other work while a 1 meg file downloads for a start!) and it's interesting to think how rapidly and how far it's come. And how relatively easily a hu-u-u-u-uge name can become a blast from the past. And no-one even really notices it's gone.

The web's a strange old place, isn't it?

'Medical myths' exposed as untrue

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Medical myths' exposed as untrue: "Dr David Tovey, editor of Clinical Evidence journal, said: 'The difficulty is it is often hard to disprove a theory.

'On the flip-side, absence of evidence does not necessarily mean absence of effect.

'Where reliable evidence becomes really important is in helping people make serious decisions about harms and risks."

Although this article isn't on first look that relevant to E891, it does contain a useful little quote which is worth bearing in mind when thinking about evidence-based education. "absence of evidence does not necessarily mean absence of effect" - and it got me thinking, if you base your practice on evidence-alone then aren't you missing things which are significant in terms of the effect they're having but that don't provide evidence? Dangerous to imagine that evidence-based practice is the only way forward when there's so much we don't know about human behaviour and social / learning interactions. There's an inherent arrogance in evidence-based practice which seems to say we know the problem, we now know the solution... ta daaaa! But who's to say what's really the problem and what are the desirable outcomes we should be working towards? And what happens when the evidence is revised in years to come and it turns out that the right way was the wrong way?!

Absence of evidence does not necessarily mean absence of effect - definitely worth bearing in mind when considering evidence-based practice in education.

League tables only do harm

League tables only do harm | Schools special reports | EducationGuardian.co.uk: "And therein lies the problem. As long as league tables exist, in a risk-averse society people dare not ignore them. Primary schools at the top of the league (which tend to be in the wealthiest areas) have a reputation to maintain; those at the bottom have to try to claw higher. The status of all teachers, governors and parents depends on how their year sixes perform in national tests."

Calling into question whether or not 'evidence' of the type that league tables provide is of any use at all since the qualitative knock on effects don't seem to feed positively into the system... or something along those lines... maybe?!

Still just good or bad...

End league tables, say governors: "End league tables, say governors Tests Children sit tests at 11 and 14 which form the basis of league tables School governors are calling for an end to the current system of league tables and national tests in England. The National Governors' Association (NGA) said the tables held information that was too narrow and misrepresented what happened in schools.

Instead it wants schools to be given a grade based on comparisons with others in similar circumstances, and tests that check individual pupils' progress."

An interesting one which relates to the ideas of 'effectiveness' discussed by Ball (1995) - here you can see one measure of success is being replaced as it misrepresents what is 'good' about schools. It's replacement? Another form of grading system. Schools are still cast in the roles of good or bad. They might have changed their approach, but there's an underlying assumption of what the problem is and how to measure / fix it.

Reference:

Ball, S. J. (1995) ‘Intellectuals or technicians? The urgent role of theory in educational studies’, British Journal of Educational studies, Vol. 43, No.3, 1995, pp.255-71, Blackwell