|
TOP TOOLS 2007 & 2008
Nick Hood
Nick is a
physics and mathematics teacher in Fife, 25 years in
industry, producer of
Mr Hood's
World-Wide-Whatsit, an education blog
and online classroom.
Nick writes "You'll notice that
all of these are free to use. Open source is a great model
for society."
Nick's Top 10 Tools as at 30 September 2008
-
Mediawiki
- the open source
power behind wikipedia and mrhood.net, my own wiki
-
Delicious - more useful than ever open/social
bookmarking
-
Gedit - the lightweight but powerfully connected text
editor for Gnome
-
Latex - typesetting and managing references with ease
-
John Forkosh's
mimetex - for easy rendering of formulae on any web
platform
-
WordPress
- still the best general purpose blogging / CMS platform
-
Audacity - open source sound management for podcasting /
sound production
-
Flashmeeting - for attending / catching up on Teachmeets,
etc
-
Twitter
- although now not as useful without the mobile connectivity
it had in UK
-
Google Calendar
- my daily memory and year-round planning tool
Not on the list but honourable
mentions to:
-
Firefox and her
wonderful plugins
-
Thunderbird,
ditto
-
Ubuntu - slicker OS
by far than anything else useful, not least because of the
community that supports it
-
Filezilla
- cross-platform FTP
-
Hexplorer
- for they bits and bobs
Nick's Top 10 Tools as at 3 February 2008
-
Mediawiki - the power behind my wiki at
mrhood.co.uk/wiki
and the slightly better known
Wikipedia
-
WordPress
- still the best of all blogging software
-
Odiogo
- effortless podcasting from a text blog, a great bonus for
those who cannot readily access the visual web
-
Twitter - a productivity tool emerging as possibly the
handiest there is. Twitter - or at least tweets (the users)
- have saved me much inconvenience
-
Stumbleupon - social bookmarking at its best, but I also
love...
-
del.icio.us - tagged bookmarking made easy and relevant
-
Filezilla - the best FTP client there is
-
Netvibes is
brilliant but I'm really liking Google reader too,
swithering between the two
-
Hexplorer is still my favourite hacker's tool
for when you just have to get into the 1's and 0's
-
and finally, where would I be without
Google Calendar
and it's mobile alerts?
Honourable mention to the Mozilla
suite of Firefox (and
it's plugin
community) and
Thunderbird. Worth mentioning that I want to ditch Windows
in favour of Ubuntu but
still can't quite cut the cord and have to keep my laptop
dual-booting.
It's changing much faster this year, it seems, so my list is
likely to be more dynamic than 2007. I'm looking closely at
Second Life (not
ready yet),
LiveMocha for languages,
Yacapaca,
Seesmic and
of course, the use of Bebo and
Facebook to reach
those kids you just can't in the school environment.
Nick's Top 10 Tools as at 4 August 2007
-
Moodle -
fabulous complete online classroom suite
-
WordPress
-
the best (imho)
blogging software, with some brilliant adaptable
plugins
-
Audacity
-
easy, functional audio
recording tool for podcasting
-
Crimson Editor -
intelligent text editor, essential for modifying code
-
Netvibes -
great content aggregator
-
SDP downloader
-
for grabbing streaming video for use
in the classroom
-
Hexplorer -
easy tool for getting down & dirty
with the byte codes (i.e. hacking video headers turning
Google video into avi)
-
Irfanview - excellent image viewer
-
OpenOffice
Impress -
better than Powerpoint, and exports to Flash
-
Scratch -
excellent easy animation code tool.
Wish it exported flash!
with an honourable
mention to:
Glow - more by hope than
experience, but this is education's take on new age
media?
and probably got
plenty of votes already but still brilliant:
|
Advertisements
|
