Tech+Tools

[|IDEAL]- The portal to access a plethora of teacher resources including unitedstreaming. (B. Feather- MIS)

[|21Classes]- Free classroom blogs for students to use in projects (B. Feather- MIS)

[|Speed Test]- Quick little way to check your browsing speed! (B Feather- MIS) [|Comiqs.com]- Make your own comics online. (Might want to keep an eye on kids, but you can create comics for your lessons! (B Feather- MIS)


 * [|Del.icio.us]** - This online bookmarking engine that connects people to many websites that are tagged, described and organized. Use this to have one location for all your bookmarks... no need for being 'away' from your bookmarks! (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|**Bloglines**] - Subscribe to different blogs and use Bloglines to organize the postings by your selected bloggers. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|**Flickr**] - Flickr is clearly the premiere social photo sharing site of the Web 2.0 world. It is packed great features like contacts, comments, and groups. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|**Picnik**] - There are a plethora of image editing sites in the world of Web 2.0, but Picnik stands out for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s pretty. The site is well laid out, easy to navigate, and incredibly intuitive. You can use the website without even registering, making it incredibly education-friendly. It may not have every feature that Photoshop has, but it does allow you to crop, resize, eliminate red-eye, adjust color and brightness levels, and save in a variety of formats. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|**GCast**] - GCast is recognized as the most popular platform for MobCasts (podcasts created via cell phone). However, it is also a powerful solution for podcasters who don’t quite understand how the RSS piece works. Anybody can upload audio files to GCast, organize them into a single or multiple podcast feeds, and then generate a flash player that is incredibly easy to embed into a blog or web site. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|**Google Docs and Spreadsheets**] - I’m sure that there are 100’s of features missing from Google’s version of Word and Excel, but I can’t seem to figure out what they are. Docs and Spreadsheets also has one clear advantage over the desktop version: it’s collaborative. While editing a document, you can invite other people to work on it with you. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|**pbWiki**]& [|**WikiSpaces**] - pbWiki is a little shinier, with it’s new point and click editor and template that’s easy on the eyes. You can also save your wikis as a PDF or create a slide show from it, unusual amongst wiki engines. Wikispaces is firmly committed to education and is in the process of giving away 100,000 ad-free wikis to educators. It has a simple WYSIWYG editor that does support embedable media (like from [|YouTube]or [|Google Video]). Wikispaces looks more like a typical wiki engine, and has a discussion tab like you’d find on [|Wikipedia]. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS) [|Coventi] - The easiest way to share, discuss and revise your documents on the web. If you've ever asked a group of people for feedback on a document, you know the flood of back-and-forth email can be overwhelming. What if there was one place for everyone to read your latest draft and make comments tied directly to the text? Tracking feedback would be that much easier and making revisions would be a snap. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|SplashCast] - SplashCast enables anyone to create streaming media 'channels' that combine video, music, photos, narration, text and RSS feeds. These user-generated channels can be played and easily syndicated on any web site, blog, or social network page. When channel owners modify their channel, their content is automatically updated across all the web pages 'tuned' to that channel. Click on the SplashCast TV to learn more about the tool. (D. Laufenberg-MEMS)

[|Feedburner.com] - Use **Feedburner** to simply aggregate your [|Blogger], [|Wordpress], [|Typepad], etc. blog content into an RSS feed. Use Feedburner's simple-to-use tools to create and manage you feed's subscriber information, and to incorporate your feed's email subscription, HTML, XML, and Javascript into other websites and applications. (J. Coe - see [|Christensen] to see Feedburner at work)

[|Lifehacker.com] - **Lifehacker** is, hands-down //the// world's best tech website for tips on better ways to //get things done//. Read it daily as a blog, or search it as-necessary. It's an invaluable resource. (J. Coe - Christensen)