Favourite Resources

Students on the OU course H800: technology-enhanced learning practices and debates have been listing favourite resources. These are a few with comment and descriptions by the students:

Mindmup: http://www.mindmup.com - is a free mind mapping tool that can be used online, with Google Drive, and on your desktop. MindMup works like most mind mapping tools in that you can create a central idea and add child and sibling nodes all over a blank canvas. MindMup nodes can contain text and links. When you're ready to save your MindMup mind map you can save it to Google Drive, save it to your desktop, or publish it online. If you publish it online, you can grab an embed code for it to post it in a blog post or webpage. 

 VideoNot.es: http://www.videonot.es - is a new tool for taking notes while watching videos. VideoNotes allows you to load any YouTube video on the left side of your screen and on the right side of the screen VideoNotes gives you a notepad to type on. VideoNotes integrates with your Google Drive account. By integrating with Google Drive VideoNotes allows you to share your notes and collaborate on your notes just as you can do with a Google Document.

 Educlipper: http://www.educlipper.net - is a place for teachers and students to collaborate on the creation of visual bookmark boards. It's kind of like Diigo with a very visual element. You can use the eduClipper bookmarklet to add "clips" (bookmarks) to your eduClipper boards. You can also add PowerPoint, PDF, and image files to your boards. You can add links to videos to your boards. You can play the videos without leaving your eduClipper board. And those who have Google Drive can add Google Drive files to their eduClipper boards. The best part of eduClipper, and why it could work really well as a collaborative tool, is that you can create class boards to share with students and they can share boards with you.

Jane Hart's Top 100 tools for learning has been going for several years now. She provides a list of tools and we can vote for tools we find most useful. The 2013 list isn't out yet, but you can have a look at 2012. I often refer to this site. Not only does it provide information about the tools that people are using, but it also gives you a picture of their popularity (uptake / decline) year by year.

The link is: http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/.

Treezilla: http://www.treezilla.org/

This project aims to record trees across the country - Citizen science from the OU. If you scroll down to the bottom of the index page, you will see links to other similar initiatives - I love the OpenScience Laboratory as well.

Stixy: http://www.stixy.com/

This is a really great interactive bulletin board. I've used it on development projects where the project teams and / or stakeholders need to work together to gather resources and share ideas. It's a very visual tool. I've also used it to create online mood boards for brainstorming and design. One idea is to use this to gather information that will inform the development of personas / user profiles.

Prezi: http://prezi.com/: 

This is a presentation tool. I probably don't need to describe this one, but it does work very well, and makes it fairly simple to create, collaborate and share online presentations. The templates allow you to produce something very slick without too much stress.