Web 2.0 Digital Dashboards

We all know there is no one silver bullet when it comes to suggesting a technology to support a learning endeavor. We mix and match and use the latest/best tools, the tools our colleagues or students have access to, and the ones they are familiar with and will use. It sometimes gets to be quite a chore keeping track of all of different sites we created to support the specified endeavor. Tweets, Google Discussion Groups, Calendars, Social bookmarks, blogs, Project management, etc., etc.

There are a couple of tools that help keep these all together in one, easy to use location - digital dashboards for our online learning environment.

• iGoogle - http://www.google.com/ig
• PageFlakes - http://www.pageflakes.com/
• Protopage - http://www.protopage.com/
• Netvibes - http://www.netvibes.com/
• Eskobo - http://www.eskobo.com/
• Favoor - http://www.favoor.com/

Personal Disclaimer - I have only used iGoogle on a regular basis so am not familiar with all the ins and outs of each service. If you have real life experience with any of these, please comment.

Netvibes Real World Example - Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success

? of the day: Would any of these fit into your classroom learning environment?

Google Workshop

Today we are working with Central Nebraska educators. We created Google Groups, and worked with Google Reader. We also worked with creating our own blogs on Blogger. Afternoon consisted of working with Picasa and Sketchup.

I would also like to share a little diversion we like to do in the afternoon. We have each participant share one technology they like to use in the classroom. Here are the results:

• Deanna - http://Twitter.com
• Jason - SmartMoves - http://www.fablevision.com/smartmoves/
• Sue - http://www.fruitfromwashington.com/Recipies/scale/recipeconversions.php
• Lynda - http://odie.esu10.org/
  
• Karla - http://simustock.com/
• Susan - http://people.hofstra.edu/Stefan_Waner/realworld/tmvcalc.html
• Barry - http://www.jingproject.com/
• Karen - http://www.jumpstart.org/realitycheck
• Sandy - http://www.librarything.com/

Mac OS X Preview - Cool FREE features

Macworld Article: Preview’s hidden powers

In the past, you had to purchase Adobe Acrobat Pro to do some of the features OS X Preview does now for free! A couple of the features you may find useful:

• Annotate - Leave comments, markup using ovals and rectangles, and create links within the document or to Internet sites.
• Delete or Rearrange pages - You can now remove or change the order of your PDF pages within Preview.
• Merge PDFs - Take two or more PDFs and merge them into one document.

The article also lists other neat features of Preview that have to do with images. Check it out!

Mad Libs

Growing up I used to love to do Mad Libs. Those creations where you come up with different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and such and create funny stories. There are several online versions of these and I wanted to share. Not only are they just plain fun, they also teach parts of speech, creativity, collaboration and sharing.

http://www.eduplace.com/tales/
http://www.madlibs.com/category/funstuff/?g=madlibs
http://www.funbrain.com/brain/ReadingBrain/ReadingBrain.html
http://www.rinkworks.com/crazylibs/

Try one out!
Embeded Mad Lib Online Widget