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  • Date: Monday, October 13, 2008 Time: 4:36 pm Category: Instructional Technology, Social Media, The Internet Tagged blist, Blogging, collaboration, edublogs, evernote, google docs, ning, phonevite, picnik, studybulb, twitter Discussion: 2 Comments

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Here are 10 free web-based tools that we’ve been looking at lately.  We thought these might be of interest and useful to the WVU community.  Check them out and let us know what you think!

Studybulb is a “free online collaborative community for study materials.” The site is stil in beta, but asking students and educators to try it out and provide feedback.  Essentially the site lets you create flash cards on any topic.  A handy study tool!

Google Docs is something that has been out for a while now and if you haven’t used it, you should check it out. You can import your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, or create new ones from scratch. Invite people to your documents and make changes together, at the same time. All you need is a Web browser. I also found out last week that they added a form creator to the spreadsheet portion that will let you create basic surveys.  Since it is a spreadsheet by default, all of your data is saved right there.

Ning lets you create your own social network.  Why would you want to create your own social network, you may ask?  Well, think about all of those group projects you’ve assigned or had to be a part of.  Creating a social network for any group with a common purpose or interest makes collaboration and communication a lot simpler.

Evernote is an online tool for saving information.  Basically anything you can access with a browser can be saved to your Evernote account.  You can also create notes and save them as well.  Evernote is particularly handy if you don’t want to bookmark a page or a website, hoping to remember why you saved it.  You can save the contents of the entire page or only a few words.  The best thing is, you can access Evernote from anywhere, so you never have to worry about which computer you are using or where the website was located.

Edublogs is a hosted blog platform that targets educators and students.  It it built on the WordPress Multiuser platform and allows educators to create and manage student blogs. They suggest the following uses for edublogs: Post materials and resources; Host online discussions; Create a class publication; Replace your newsletter; Get your students blogging; Share your lesson plans; Integrate multimedia of all descriptions; Organise, organise, organise; Get feedback; Create a fully functional website.

Twitter is something that really requires it’s own post, but I’ll mention it here nonetheless.  If you don’t know what Twitter is, don’t worry, but it is somewhat of a phenomenon. So at the very least find out more about it.  Twitter allows you to “microblog.”  Basically it allows you to post 140 character messages and anyone who “follows” you can read them.  There is a lot of potential here for blasting out messages to a group of people all at once.  It can also be really handy for getting feedback.  It also syncs up with other social media like Facebook and MySpace, to your blog.

Picnik is an online photo editor that can do basic photo editing with any digital photo.  It also syncs up with your Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, etc. account.

Phonevite is an interesting combination of new and old technology.  It phones groups of people at the same time rather than emailing.  This is particularly nice if you have a last minute change and need to contact a bunch of people at once.

blist lets you create – you guessed it – Web lists (’b lists… get it??).  It is a simple concept (as most successful web apps are): easily create and share lists. It uses drag-and-drop to organize information.  You can make a personal to-do list or do something more complicated like building a sophisticated business database.

So what online tools are you using?  Have you tried any of these?  What did you think?