Mendeley

I wrote about the bibliography tool Zotero a while back and I'm excited to share another promising option in this category called Mendeley. It's a bit misleading to refer to these tools as just bibliography tools since they really allow you to do so much more. When I was a doctoral student I used EndNote to keep track of all the articles, book chapters, websites and other references I uncovered in my research and this was a great help in creating an accurately formatted bibliography for my dissertation. But the downside of a tool like EndNote is that it costs money (boo) and it is confined to just a single machine.

Mendeley is free (yeah) and it allows you to sync your list of references across multiple machines. However, that is just the beginning of the great features available with this amazing tool. Mendeley automatically extracts metadata such as title, author, publication, you know, all that stuff you normally have to type in yourself, and creates a new reference in your library. You can access and manage this library online and across multiple machines. You are also able to share your library with others and invite them to annotate the references in your library. Mendeley also supports full text searching of your articles and you can even capture citations directly from the browser, which is incredibly handy considering how so much of the research we do these days is online. You can even create bibliographies right within Word or Open Office.

I still have that same copy of EndNote I purchased when I first became a doctoral student but I don't think I'll be upgrading it anytime soon. Not with alternative options like Mendeley out there.

Fliggo

Are you looking for a tool you can use to showcase your students' videos in a safe and controlled environment? Do you want your own video sharing tool that you can get unblocked in your district so that students can use it without fear of filtering? Then Fliggo is just the tool for you. Fliggo allows you to create your very own version of YouTube where you control the video content. You are able to control who adds content, who views the videos and who comments on the videos. This level of control is particularly powerful for the k-12 educator. You can create your own site with Fliggo, upload your students' videos, or other videos you want to share with them, and never have to deal with the headaches and questionable content found on those "other" video sharing sites. There is a great video tour you can watch to learn more about the many features of Fliggo. Like the many web-based tools out there, Fliggo doesn't care if you are using a Mac or a PC and it doesn't require any prior knowledge of HTML or programming in order to use it. If you are looking for a way to showcase student videos and facilitate the use of videos with your students than Fliggo is definitely worth checking out.

Picnik and Cameroid

Today I'm writing about two more web-based photo tools that are free and fairly easy to use. Picnik is an online editor and Cameroid allows you to take pictures with your webcam and then add a variety of different effects.

Picnik is an incredibly powerful photo editing tool that allows you to pull pictures in from all the major photo sharing sites as well as directly from your computer. It is completely web-based and therefore doesn't require any downloads or specific operating system. In fact, you don't even have to register in order to use it, which makes it even more accessible for classroom use. You can add special effects, backgrounds and text to your pictures as well as do all the basic editing tasks such as color correction, cropping, image resizing and much more. One classroom application of a tool such as Picnik would be to touch-up images before including them on your classroom website.

Cameroid is the equivalent of Photo Booth (Mac only) but web-based so the Windows users of the world can now join in the fun. Cameroid is a photo capturing tool with some editing features built in. One of the common uses of this tool is to take a self-portrait of yourself with your webcam and then add all sorts of fun special effects to create a very customized profile picture.

Humana Games 4 Health

Humana Games 4 Health is an engaging site where kids can play a variety of games that help reinforce healthy eating and living habits. Users can navigate around the town, stopping at different locations such as the Schoolzone, Hospital, Senior Citizen Center and Workzone. The screenshot below shows a portion of this community.


At each location they can learn different facts and information about healthy living. Most of the locations have their own games for students to play that also reinforce that specific information. For instance, at the Physical Therapy building you can play the Freewheeling Cycle Challenge where you navigate your bike around the course trying to avoid potholes and other obstacles while also needing to pick up water, fruit and other nutritious items in order to keep your energy level high. Students can also participate in The Horsepower Challenge, which is an offline challenge where students keep track of the steps they take and log them online as a way to track their physical activity.

Dummies.com

It was only a matter of time before the folks who brought us the helpful "Dummies" series of how-to books went digital and started creating how-to videos. Dummies.com has a variety of short videos that explain how to do all sorts of things. The videos are geared towards...well...dummies in the same way as the books. That is, they are easy to follow and learn from. Access to the videos is free and they are searchable by keyword and also categorized by topic. You can share the videos you find through a whole host of social networking tools but it doesn't appear that you can embed them directly into a website or blog. You may not find much for students to watch or learn from on this site but there is certain to be some topics that you may find useful. That's not to say that I would consider you a dummy or anything.