Most of these probably are on the community radar by now, but here are a few new tools that I’ve run across that might be of interest:
Google Blog Search and Google Custom Search–The one thing that I’ve always been frustrated with at Technorati is the multiple steps it takes to set up an RSS feed for a blog search. Now, Google has made subscribing to a blog search feed as easy as subbing a news search feed. And the custom search makes it easy for every student to have a personal search of his/her blog or network.
Vox–This is the new social community set up by the founders of Moveable Type. Here’s my new Vox blog…anyone else got a site and want to be friends? What is intriguing about this is that it has many levels of privacy for individual pieces of content. It’s got all sorts of tie ins to del.icio.us and Flickr and stuff, extensive tagging and connecting capability, and fairly unobtrusive ads. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has been thinking about Vox for classroom blogging/networking.
Flock Scrapbook–In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, I LOVE Flock. And now I love it even more. The scrapbook extension makes it easy for me to save an entire page, save a snippet of a page, highlight and annotate the stuff that I save, tag it all and organize it, search it all, and keep like tons of notes from disparate sources pretty well organized. It’s not a social extension, obviously, but it solves some of the limitations of del.icio.us that have frustrated me, namely the note space and full page archiving limitations. I’ve been playing with it for about a week and it’s pretty amazing. Anyone else on to it?
technorati tags:Vox, Flock, tools, weblogg-ed
I’ve used Google Custom Search to create the Edublogosphere Search which currently indexes around 170 blogs. Volunteers are free to edit and improve it! 🙂
I think Google is going to make a huge push into education in the next few months and I am just hoping to catch the wave and ride it for as long as I can. I was lucky enough to be selected to be one of the 50 participants in the ‘Google Teacher Academy’ that will take place on the Google campus in Mountain View, CA on November 7, 2006. (http://edtechvalley.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-teacher-academy-part-ii_27.html) If you look at all of the new things they are pushing out to get into the hands of teachers and students on their educators site, it is obvious this is a new growth area for them. (http://edtechvalley.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-school-making-difference-around.html)
I am truly excited to be offered the opportunity to go and see the inner workings of Google and come away with plenty of new ideas.
I’ll be blogging about all of them as soon as I can.
I used Flock when it first came out, but I stopped for some reason. I think it was because I had trouble posting to my blogs with it. Now, with Firefox 2.0 out and subscribing to my Bloglines account so easy I find I don’t miss it. I also found a cool blogging extension called “Deepest Sender” that is in my right click that was a snap to configure to use with my blog.
Just a note: Scrapbook is also a Firefox extension that I use almost every day along with the inimitable research extension, Zotero (it is a real piece of work).
As long as we are mentioning, if you haven’t tried Songbird you need to. It is an extraordinary mashup of Firefox, a media player, and I am not sure what else. The screencast on the software’s homepage is a model of clarity in the Flash idiom. http://www.songbirdnest.com/
Scrapbook looks interesting but I think EverNote (http://www.evernote.com/en/) has some capabilities that I like even better. The basic version of EverNote is free and allows me to capture and source any text or images that I find online by clicking a button on my browser. Notes are organized by categories and date, and there is a note history feature that keeps track of changes. What I really like about EverNote, is I can also use it off line. In fact, I used it to take notes of your presentation during the TLI Mohonk conference last week! (Great job by the way…) It’s worth taking a look!
I have used Flock since it was first released and really feel it is a great tool. The integration of Flickr and del.icio.us are so wonderful. I have had a few problems with the HTML is renders in the Blog posting tool. It is a great tool and I would totally recommend it to anyone who is an active participant in the read/write web.
Hi Will,
I was asked to use Vox when it was first released on Beta back before summer. At the time there were so few of us it was difficult to see how it could be useful. However, the toolset make it great for small communities, private ones, where we don’t want to share with the whole wide world. That’s the scenario it works best in since it’s so unthreatening.
We will be trialling it in some classes in East Lothian since I think it fits with a particular age group. I’ll not say which one – I’d be interested in what others think.
Vox might be something I roll out for a few of my vanguard of the blogetariat in my classes. Thanks for the heads up here. Lots of meat in this and very generous upload policies.
Hello, Will,
I enjoy reading your blog, as I think you have one of the better takes on the ways that technology can help level the educational playing field. However, this post didn’t sit right with me.
I lay out some of these concerns on my blog —
Cheers,
Bill
I put together a google custom search on educational technology. Custom search looks like it could be a useful tool if communities colaborate. My custom search is here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=017361993413704317752%3Amh2e5niwj-i
I’ve started using scrapbook and it is a great addition to aggregating information. I love Flock (actually, I thinhk I got you started using it! 🙂 Thanks for the lead.