An A-Z of Web 2.0 tools

In case you needed to spend more hours checking out different tools...:-)

A-Z of web 2.0 tools on Box of Tricks

Highlighting on Diigo

Bruce was asking about highlight tools and this was the one I was thinking about. It's part of Diigo, which is another social bookmarking (as we saw with del.icio.us) but has a few more possibilities including highlight and annotation features ('sticky notes' is one) and possibly more extended collaboration potential.

 http://www.diigo.com/index

Like delicious, you install a toolbar so you can add sources to your library as you search the web. Some of our students use this - if Ammar drops by again, he's one:-) In fact one of our students, Stephen Henneberry, set up an edtechtesol group on diigo and if anyone is interested, sign up for diigo and I'll send an invite. Not sure if you can see it without signing up but it's at http://groups.diigo.com/group/ed_tech_tesol



Anyway here's an explanation of how the highlighting works Clip talking you through highlighting

Xtranormal online text to speech movies

This looks like an application along the lines of Voki but more flexible to produce longer pieces and specifically work on dialogues. Learners write dialogues and the application uses text to speech technology to convert to the movie clips.
This URL takes you to a sample and a Spanish as a FL teacher's thoughts on its use along with some useful perspectives of others who have commented.
Box of Tricks: Xtranormal

There is also a link to further examples on the school website (examples in Spanish as a FL) Nottingham High School. Notice it has blogging features so learners can react to each others' work.

Xtranormal is herehttp://www.xtranormal.com/
Diane

Eyeplorer.com

I've had a quick look at this today. Eyeplorer is a graphic knowledge tool. I guess it's based on mindmapping principles but actively searches for associations with a concept. Try Web 2.0 as an example. You can drag facts you want to keep to a notepad. I think it looks amazing but have a few reservations about the fact that it seems to be so closely linked to wikipedia for definitions, but then you can search for related web documents, images, twitter content even. Anyway would be interested tp hear your thoughts

http://eyeplorer.com/show/
Diane

Online writing tools

Created with http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp

There are so many online tools now that you could spend hours playing and then deciding it's not for you. We might look at some key attributes to help us make decisions about what might be appropriate for what we want to do. Web 2.0 tools all share the attribute of being, usually freely, available and usable online ( some tools of course still require physical installation to your local computer). For those that 'run' online, one distinguishing characteristic seems to be how flexible they are in allowing you to download content for local use (eg the Vokis) or whether you leave content on a web server somewhere and you link to this (eg Youtube).

As you can see this tool allows online text generation, which is then downloaded as an image, which I was easily able to embed in this posting so this could be added to a class writing blog. You'll see there are different formats for the output, though I'm not sure about all of these - the newspaper clipping seemed to have some potential.

But this does make me think about the role these tools in stages of writing development - many seem to relate to 'publishing' (not to be minimised in terms of motivational power and establishing a sense of audience) but  not to facilitating processes associated with drafting and revising. Any thoughts?