One of the things I have as my "big three" this year is the concept of a paperless portfolio using adobe acrobat pro. I'm a member of Adobe ed exchange and am using it to find all kinds of great resources. This page has links to best practices for eportfolios, digital assessment, as well as streamlining admin tasks. Useful resources. The cool thing is you can annotate with video, audio, an text and pdfs move very well onto ipads and devices like that.
I have to admit that I've become a huge Acrobat Pro fan. We use it in my classroom to print, annotate, and do all kinds of things. I look forward to learning about how to use this program to convert everything into year end portfolio dvds with movies, text, etc.
Ah, epaper. Digital books. They started as barely a blip but now have become the battleground for the next all out war between tech giants.
"The app update -- which Apple is calling iBooks 2 and is already released to the iOS App Store -- will allow for textbooks to be sold through the popular app, which in the past sold novels, nonfiction and poetry, but not textbooks.
All textbooks sold through the free app, which is available only to Apple's i-devices, will be priced at $14.99 or less -- a stark contrast to the high-priced paper books that fill college bookstores.
But the main allure might not be the price as much as the interactive features iBooks textbooks can offer.
Apple, which announced the iBooks update at a press event in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, said the iBooks textbook exceeds paper texts in terms of engagement, calling it a durable, quickly searchable book that offers easy highlighting and note-taking as well as interactive photo galleries, videos, and 3-D models and diagrams.
A library of information of all types of sources and documents. AS a suggestion copy out of wikisource and paste into Tagxedo to find meaning and format. This should be a strategy for making meaning out of massive texts by students. You can do this with whole books.
Google ngram viewer is an important tool that searches the frequency of the occurrence of certain words across all text of a period. I've blogged about this before. Another important tool for researching.
One of my favorite tools is evernote. I email to evernote. I pull it up on my ipad. I take photographs and scan to evernote and can search text. It is on my phone, my ipad, my computers. My notebook that I carry everywhere. Great tool.
It is great to watch this Webmaking 101 course for journalists evolve. jess Klein wants to "create authentic learning experiences around webmaking projects." This is a brainstorm about how to teach journalists the basics of html, css, and copyright authentically. I'm looking for the site. I love it. The site would strip out everything but the text and let the journalists add things back in.
A Twitter-like social network study group platform. Post comments, upload and share files, use the collaborative whiteboard and text and video chat to help users study together when apart.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Edit PDF documents with this great site. Just upload or link to an online PDF, add text, free hand writing/drawing and images, then download. Great for adding additional instruction or hand in dates to the PDFs you find online. No sign up require to use most features.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
A useful site where you can type a message and it is read out using a voice synthesiser. There doesn't seem to be a limit to the length of the message. You can share the link to share the message. You can change the pitch, speed and more. It's a great way of giving instructions or homework over the net.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
Markdown is a simple way to format text and is being used in many notetaking and to-do apps. I'm learning about markdown and came across this excellent article so you could learn more too.