Who's Favouriting Your Tweets?

So you spend a few hours or more a week tweeting and more importantly continuingly developing your Personalised Leanring Network (PLN). You've gotten to the point where your network is a really valuable tool to help you find resources and answer questions when designing your SOW and session plans.



When you review what your PLN have been posting since you were last on there and you don't have time to check out all the links and resources that have been discussed you favourite them so that you can easily find them when you do have time or when you need them to design your course.



Ever wondered who favourites your tweets? Who in your PLN really values what you are saying? Now you can by using third party website Favstar. You simply log in to the site using your Twitter credentials and you can check out who you have favourited and who has favourited you and what tweets they marked.

Reading eBooks

A friend recently asked what I thought of eReaders and which one would i recommend?

The abridged version was that i had used both a Kindle and a Sony Portable Reader and that i had found both very clunky and neither offered a good user experience. Nothing was being offered up to enhance the experience that so many people love of reading a good book.

My friend was disappointed, he thought he had found the amazing elusive birthday present he always failed to buy his wife for her birthday.
I told him to hang tight, the iPad is going to change the face of the eReaders. Granted it's four times the price but the user experience is slick, Apple have nailed the 'touch' interaction with the iPhone and the iPod Touch devices.

In the mean time if you want to spend £100 on an eReader in an attempt to engage hard to reach learners in reading then the following resource is a good starting point to device which is the most appropriate device for yours or your learners needs. For those that can wait, at £430 the iPad is going to change the way we use the internet and (funds permitting) the way we teach in the classroom.

eReader Comparison Site

Tagul

I've been looking at the use of tag clouds to analyse the content of an online article or an entire website. Tagul is a new site where you can very quickly generate a cloud of words that describe the content of any url that you enter. All you have to do is enter a username and an email address, they then send you a password and you can create up to 20 seperate clouds.

You can view an example of the cloud whilst logged in to the website (if you were doing this with as a demonstration to a class) or you can copy the HTML code and paste it on a page in your blog and the words will actually link to the content they are derived from.
I've created a tag cloud based on the Community Learning and Skills Development Ning; those of you that are members will be taken straight to the page the word is derived from, those that aren't will have to request access to the network first!

Or this one based on my twitter page

Try creating a tag cloud based on your personal page on the Ning or your own blog by going to tagul.com

Online Logo Maker

Been a while but thought i should share this with everyone as you are busy preparing lesson plans for the impending academic year!

Very clever way to get learners working in groups, searching for images on the internet, creating logos and devising slogans together. Or perhaps you could use it to help produce a logo for an exercise or mocked up case study?!?

Simply use the 3 buttons in the top left hand corner to upload image, add a text box and add a symbol. You can also download your logo file (as a .olm file) and upload a logo file so you can work on it across lessons. You can't save it as an image file usinf the online version but you could download and install the free trial at home and export your learners files as images if you want them to use the logos to produce newsletters.

Very simple and very intuitive little website, i can see it being a really useful form of summative assessment for entry level learners working towards a functional skills qualification. Let me know if you come up with any other ways of applying it in the classroom!

www.onlinelogomaker.com/