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Keeping up with “the Waters”…

Every time I check my netvibes (RSS Aggregator), I am astounded that there is one or two new posts from Sue Waters. I’ve mentioned Sue a few times throughout this blog and her content often inspires me to write a post in response. Like this post I wrote in response to Sue’s article about innovation being challenged by all the constraints currently on us, like blocked sites within DET.

Sue is a Aquaculture teacher at Challenger TAFE in Perth. She trials a lot of new technology with her classes, on her blog she provides useful examples, guidelines, tips and much more. If you are interested in m-Learning, PDA’s, mobile phones, spy glasses, etc, and you don’t already read or subscribe to Sues blog, you’re missing out on loads of good tips and advice.

First of all, thanks to Sue Waters for posting an introduction of everyone that’s participating in the 31 Day Blogging Challenge created by Darren Rowse. It’s a great way to find out about everyone involved.

Sue, I think you’ve really started something with this netvibes Vs GoogleReader thing with the comments on your post;

“Alex from Miller’s Spin (Australia) may well cause me to be banned from Google forever. Her great screencast of how she uses Netvibes to subscribe to blogs has convinced a lot of bloggers not only to try Netvibes but also to give Jing a go. Which I did - and here is my quick screecast of how I use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs!” Sue Waters

I liked the jing movie you created and have linked to above, it was very informative. I love that GoogleReader let’s you view the blog posts on that one page, that makes life easy! As RSS feed readers go, both netvibes and Google Reader actually do very similar things (I also use iGoogle), but I do find netvibes a little prettier (much like Mac vs Windows) and has more ‘theme’ customisation options. I also love that you can drag pods over the tabs to drop them into different pages.

So you want to create some learning materials that engage your learners, but don’t know where to start? Try this free little tool called Jing.

I started creating a list of sites offering free online eBooks, audio files, videos, learning tools and materials for educators, then I found this great wiki - Librarian Chick that has so many amazing listings already, I thought why create my own?

Here are a few of the tools and sites listed on - Librarian Chick that I thought were good.
Tiny URL - Have you noticed a lot of the links that come via the Australian Flexible Learning Framework start with http://tinyurl.com? This web tool allows you to transform lengthy URL’s that often get broken up during a copy and paste, into a shorter more manageable URL. Check it out. There’s also a Firefox extension for this.

There are many great extensions (I’ll list my favourite ones at the bottom of this post), but for now I’d like to show you Twitterbar. And a list of my favourite Firefox Extensions

New to RSS? I know I’ve mentioned netvibes before, but the new features really are amazing!