Naming My Sources: Part 1

I've decided to start naming some of the sources I use to locate new and interesting websites and information. I've decided to do this for a number of reasons

• I just don't have time to write about everything I find, so this gives people the opportunity to find things for themselves and perhaps write about them.
• I always feel guilty that I don't acknowledge the sources of much of the information I get. This isn't because I'm guarding my sources, it has more to do with not working in a very organised way. I tend to mark interesting sites and come back to them later, by which time I can't remember the original source.
• I don't have a blog roll, but I would like to send some kudos to some of the sites and site owners that I feel have really helped me.
• A number of people have asked me how and where I find great sites to write about.
  

If you have a blog and it doesn't appear on this list, please don't be offended, I will try to make this a regular feature as there are so many that I don't think it's useful for readers to put them all into one post.

Lastly, before I get started I would also like to say that the list is not in order of importance, so I'm not saying that any one source is better than another. Anyway, here goes:



KillerStartups
This site is a great source of new websites that have just been launched or are in Beta or Alpha still. One thing I really like about the site is that users can rate the site in terms of its likelihood of surviving. There is some basic information about the new sites, then some reasons why it might succeed and some reasons why it might fail. Users can also add their comments. This is potentially quite a useful activity for students too as it gets them reading and evaluating - valuable thinking and analytic skills practice.



Go2Web20.net
This is another great source and one that I could browse for hours. It also has a really nicely designed interface which shows you the logos of all the sites. If you mouse over the logo you'll see a brief description and clicking on the logo gives you a more detailed description. There's a search engine too, if you know what you want to find. Every time I visit the site I find at least 4 or 5 really interesting sites within a few minutes.



WebWorkerDaily
This is another favourite of mine and is the source of lots of great information and ideas. It's a great place to get ideas, tips and information about ways to work more efficiently with your computer, but tends to be more 'geek' than educationally orientated. Still a great source of information though, and it's well worth checking through the archives if you have some time.



Demo Girl
This is a great source for finding useful sites and demo girl also provides video tutorials showing how to use the sites. There's quite a huge archive of information on her site too, so it's well worth sorting through the archive search categories on the right of the screen.



MakeUseOf
This is another great source of information and in particular web based apps or free software. They tend to focus mostly on free stuff which is handy and they have a great Web2.0 Directory which is worth browsing through, especially if you are looking for a particular tool.

Well that's probably enough to keep you busy for a while. All of these sites provide an RSS feed, so if you don't have time to look through the archives, just sign up to the feed and keep up to date with what's new on them.

If you don't have a feedreader, you can check out my article on Creating a personal hompage using Netvibes as that can really save you some time.

Hope you enjoy these sources and find something useful. More coming in the next week or two.

Best

Nik Peachey

Top tools for e-learning

For a while now Jane Hart over at Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day has been collecting the top 10 favourite tools of a range of people involved in e-learning.

These have been compiled into a top 100 from, would you believe it, a directory of over 2,000! Anyway, I'm proud to say that I have now also contributed my own top 10 to the collection. I think this is a great idea so do check out the collection. The collection of 2,000 is also categorized, so if you are looking for something particular, like a tool for blogging, (there are more than 70 of those) or a Virtual World tool (there are 31 in this category alone!) then it's a great place to look. Anyway, if you'd rather not go through all those at the moment, here's a look at the 10 I submitted as my top 10 tools.

Nik's Top 10 Tools as at 20 March 2008

1. Blogger: This is my basic essential survival tool for writing my blogs. As I look around more I realise it's probably not the best tool in the world for creating blogs, but it's certainly an easy tool to use and one that does the job well and doesn't cost anything.
2. Second Life: I seem to have gotten drawn into Second Life, despite the fact that it's far from my favourite virtual world, and I now rent my own office space there. I was drawn in by an increasing amount of course design work that I get related to it and a fascination with the interface and the illusion of 3D. Great place to take a meeting too, much prefer it to using Skype.
3. NVU: This is a new tool that I've started using recently for web management and development. I have been using DreamWeaver for quite some time, but decided to make the switch to a free tool that I could use on both PC and MAC as my copy of DreamWeaver became increasingly out of date and unstable. So far it's worked out pretty well and the learning curve has been quite simple to deal with.
4. Instapaper: This is another free tool which I use almost every day. It's a sort of cross between a temporary favourites page and an annotation / bibliography tool. It creates a small plug in for my Firefox task bar and whenever I spot something I want to read I click on a read later button which saves the link to my Instapaper page. Then when I have some time I can go back and read through the articles and either delete them, annotate them as a bibliography or just leave them as read.
5. Stumble upon: This is one of my favourite plug ins for Firefox. It's a great way to find new sites and I use it when ever I have a free moment. You can create your own favourites page and share the sites you find as well as adding new sites and reviewing them. But the best feature is just clicking on the Stumble button and looking at random sites that matches my interest criteria
6. Google Browser sync for Firefox: This is another great plug in for Firefox and it enables me to sync history, favourites, passwords etc across my Firefox browser on any computer. I frequently have a MAC and PC running at the same time and so this keeps all my browser information synchronised without me having to do anything apart from install the plug in.
7. Google analytics: This is a great way to track stats for websites and blogs etc and it's free. The information is a lot more accurate and in depth than many paid for tools and gives me loads of information about my site content, where my visitors are coming from and what they are looking at etc. I'm addicted to it!
8. Hottnotes: Juggling lots of different projects along with family commitments and running my own business can get a bit overwhelming sometimes. Hottnotes really helps me keep on top of things and remember those meetings and phone conferences. I can create post-it type reminders for my desk top or to-do lists and program them to remind me when specific tasks should be done. Essential stuff, just a shame there isn't a MAC version.
9. BBFlashback: This is the only tool in my top 10 that I have actually paid for. It's a software tool for recording screen cast tutorials and I've used it for all of the tutorials on my blog. It's easy to use, reliable and adding branding, call-outs and audio is all pretty easy. It also exports to a lot of different formats including Flash swf files and avi files. I can also import short avi video files made on my digital camera and edit them and then export them to Flash (I find that useful honest!)
10. My Yahoo Feed Reader: I'm sure this probably isn't the best feed reader in the world but MyYahoo homepage is what I started with and I've got comfortable and stuck with it. RSS is one of those really big time savers and I can scan all of the new content on my favourite sites and blogs in just a few minutes and pick out the things I'm interested in reading, not to mention my horoscope and world news. It's saved me hours of going from site to site.

Hope you enjoy these.

Best
Nik