Allrighty, down to brass tacks.  I have just reduced the amount of time that I spent researching a topic by using two (free) web tools.  The first one is:

• Diigo – This allowed me to read through several web pages and highlight (online) the things that I thought were useful.  This saved:

  - Time: I didn’t have to write everything out or copy it by hand, and later when I wanted to refer to my notes I was able to look them up through my tags!

  - Trees:  I didn’t have to print out to save my highlights…

  - Space:  I can always go back to my highlights, and I don’t have to save them anywhere on my hard drive or in hard copy!!!

• Zotero – In the end I needed to create a bibliography.  In general, I regularly have to create bibliographies with two completely different systems:  MLA and APA.  Zotero will automatically bookmark and generate these bibliographies for you.  And, with the simple selection of a dropdown box it will generate the correct bibliography format for you.  This is helpful in three ways:

  - Saves Time: Zotero can generate a bibliography faster than I can.

  - Encourages Better Tracking of Sources:  You can easily keep track of web resources with Zotero.  At the minimum it requires the press of a button.  And, as you are researching, you can manually add other resources as well.  If you are in practice of bookmarking all of your web resources, you are more likely to also be more cognizant of capturing other types of resource information (especially since it is so easy to generate a bibliography with all of it in the end).

  - Better Bibliographies:  You don’t have to think with Zotero.  For the different types of sources, it prompts you for the correct information for the bibliography.  And, when bibliographies are generated, it does it in the correct format.  No more corrections due to bad formatting, missed commas, missed information, etc.  Zotero does it for you.

I think that these two tools are essential for efficient research and resource-tracking.  I strongly recommend them for teachers and students.  They are easy to use and they make life easier!!

OK… I know that it has been a while since I have posted.  But, to my defense there was a bout of time when I could not log in.  They were performing some sort of maintenance that kept forcing me to change my password and never actually get to the edit screen.  This is the first time that I have tried since August, I think.  But, here it goes.

I have been toiling about looking for 2.0 tools for teaching, and here is what I have recently come up with:

• Quizlet – this is a cool site for drill and practice learning.  You can make digital flashcards that quiz you, test you, and even make little mini games for you.  This is not for higher-level learning, but it is good for rote memorization.
• I have developed a few course pages using Google Sites.  They provide free webspace to create basic websites (all with a very easy interface for development).  You can see an example of a more complex site here:  DIS ToK.
• There are two different application development (free) environments out there (excellent for creating simple games and getting students to use higher order thinking skills):  Scratch and another hosted by Microsoft that I can’t seem to find right now…
• I have found an interesting tool for coding learning called Hackety Hack, but I haven’t tried it out yet…
• If you want to create very cool characters for handouts in your classroom, check out SP Studio by Janina Koeppel.  I would recommend it for teachers to use to create images for the classroom, but not to recommend to students (due to a section of the app where you can have your character choose weapons – ugh).