Emerging Technologies Consulting

Today collection of tools is of a much higher quality than anything I looked at last week.  I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find anything worthwhile out there.  But today we have an annotation tool, a huge collection of delicious (social bookmarking) tools, and Academic Earth, the educational video collection.

• A.nnotate is a prouduct that lets you upload documents in many different formats and put “stickies” on them.  Those documents can then be shared with others so that you can collaborate on projects with others.  There are a number of different pricing plans, including one specifically for academic institutions that also includes a way to integrate with Learning Management Systems.  They tout the ability to integrate with Moodle and also say they can integrate with other systems.  This will cost you a fair amount of money–around $3000 for unlimited usage–but it might save you your own server costs in some areas.  They also have a free version for individuals to use that looks like it will suit most peoples needs.  Although both Diigo and Google docs allow for some commenting and collaboration, this product allows multiple formats from pdfs to web pages and the notes are intuitive to make and read.  This definitely looks like a product worth investigating and I’m thinking it would be great for commenting on student work.  I’ve often used the comment feature in various word processors and although that works, there could be compatibility problems and it just feels a little clunky to me.
• Absolutely Delicious is really a web page with a list of links to a wide variety of delicious tools.  I’m a big fan of delicious so it’s nice to see a list of resources that can help me take advantage of that tool better.  There are tools that help you manage, retag, post, and search you bookmarks.  Some are web based and some are desktop tools.  There are also instructions for posting delicious links to your blog and simply how to get started using delicious.  I highly recommend adding *this* site to your bookmarks and try out some of the tools on the site.
• Academic Earth is a site I looked at and wrote a bit about before.  I really do like the look an feel of this site.  It’s uncluttered and very easy to navigate.  I had said earlier that compared to YouTube, the site had less material, but it’s definitely growing, and I think the way it’s organized by subject matter makes a lot of sense.  The YouTube EDU site is organized by school and many of the videos listed under the school are more promotional than educational.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, but if you’re looking for physics lectures, you’ll have to do a search.  Once you click a video, you’re out of the EDU portal and getting back isn’t easy.  While there are 691 videos on YouTube’s EDU site labelled physics compared to AE’s 4, I still think that AE is going to win out–at least it should.  While YouTube fell into being used for education, AE was built for it and there are features that make it a better tool for that reason.  In addition to the listing by topic or subject, there are also playlists organized by editors.  Those playlists include “Understanding the Economic Crisis” and “Wars Throughout History.”  I’m planning to use those with my kids–at least my high schooler–this summer.  There just seems to be more potential for building out an entire learning unit from AE lectures than from YouTube materials.

These are definitely must check out tools.  Let me know what you think of them or how you’re using them!