While providing great content is critical if you want to establish a loyal audience, it is only one of a variety of ingredients. Other factors come into play; most importantly, your visitors need to see that you've made every effort to accommodate their needs; that you've put much thought into their experience on your site. To create a blog that stands out from the others, use this list of useful WordPress plugins to show your readers that you have made the effort, and you'll be rewarded with return visitors and growth. So what do your visitors really want?

Ed Shepherd, a middle school administrator in Virginia and valuable member of my personal learning network, recently posted a call for definitions of collaboration. In this case, I decided to forget my affinity for 140 characters and bring it to my blog. So, what is collaboration?

Though this article is written for the business sector, there are many great parallels with how we experience social media's acceptance in the educational realm. The suggestions that are given are readily applied to our setting, as well. In the enterprise, many employees think blogs are merely websites on which people talk about their cat or their latest meal. Many don't know the differences between and advantages of such tools as message boards, blogs, and wikis. They have heard of these terms in passing, but the demands of their day-to-day jobs have prevented them from recognizing the distinct benefits of each tool. Solution: It is useless to advocate for social media tools in a vacuum. Unless you're describing a solution to a practical problem, busy workers will not respond to buzzwords like "wiki," "blog," and "community." Your client usually has about a 30-second attention span in which you can sell a social media tool. An aide in my arsenal has been the excellent videos by Lee Lefever at Common Craft. Lee visually explains social media concepts "In Plain English." Common Craft videos quickly explain complex and sometimes unfamiliar technologies in a few minutes, sans the buzzwords, hype, and sensationalism. Problem: Cynical Clients Who Don't Want to Share Information Unfortunately, some potential SharePoint users balk at the technology because they have no desire to share their knowledge for the benefit of the organization. These individuals tend to equate their knowledge with job security; therefore, they feel nervous about sharing out of fear that they wouldn't be needed any more.

Storynory is an online treasure trove of audio stories. Here you will find a mixture of new stories, fairy tales, and specially adapted myths and histories. We also have a sprinkling of verse. We have published an audio story every week since November 2005. Storynory has grown and grown in popularity, and now around a quarter of a million mp3 files are downloaded every month from our servers. Our stories are read by Natasha Gostwick and her clear story-telling voice has won a place in the hearts of children and adults all over the world.

Quick: what was the most widely-used form of media in 2008? If you guessed Internet news sites, blogs, or social networks, you'd be way off. Network TV news (NBC, CBS, ABC) is still used by the highest percentage of adult Internet users, with local newspapers and local TV news occupying the 2nd and 3rd positions, respectively, in a recently released survey from Ketchum. While old media is still on top, the trends in the survey, which has been conducted each of the last three years, point to a familiar story: media consumption habits are quickly changing. That said, some forms of new media are performing much better than others. For example: - Blogs are now used by 24% of Internet users, up from 13% in 2006 - Social networks are now used by 26% of Internet users, up from 17% in 2006 - Videocasts are now used by 11% of Internet users, up from 6% in 2006 Slower growers include: - RSS feeds: growing from 5 to 7 percent - Podcasts: growing from 5 to 7 percent - Business news sites: flat at 8 percent

A GREAT EXAMPLE OF HOW WEB2.0 LETS US BE PRODUCERS AND NOT JUST CONSUMERS. Audiolife not only lets you create an online store to sell CDs and digital downloads, but it will actually manufacture the CDs for you, on-demand, as customers buy them. The up-front cost? Nothing. Zero dollars and zero cents. On-demand CD creation from Audiolife. (Credit: Audiolife) This is a big deal. As any self-financed musician knows, CD manufacturing is a big investment. Print runs for CDs with a jewel case and nice color insert generally start at 1,000 for close to $1,000, though you can get away with spending a few hundred bucks for a short run, if you're willing to pay quite a bit more per disc. This is all well and good, if you sell all of the CDs you print. If not, you're left with some expensive drink coasters.

The top-down, authoritarian model found in most classrooms today looks very different from the model many students experience when they learn online. The classroom's hierarchical approach, with the sage on the stage, requires, (and, ultimately demands) passivity and deference on the part of the learner. Informal, interest-driven networked learning, with its access to large stores of information and variety of opinion, on the other hand, takes a much different view of authority. It's usually peer based, largely democratic, meritocratic, often creates dissonance due to variety and demands evaluation. Knowing what we do about active learning, one would seem clearly superior to the other.

Yes - come awesome Web 2.0 tools listed for educators

2009 Horizon Report the web version * Browse Comments o by Commenter o by Section o General Comments * Contents o Executive Summary o Technologies to Watch o Key Trends o Critical Challenges o The Horizon Project o One Year or Less: Mobiles o One Year or Less: Cloud Computing o Two to Three Years: Geo-Everything o Two to Three Years: The Personal Web o Four to Five Years: Semantic-Aware Applications o Four to Five Years: Smart Objects o Methodology o 2009 Horizon Project Advisory Board * Recent Comments o Four to Five Years: Semantic-Aware Applications Semantic UMW in the NMC 2009 Horizon Report - Semantic UMW says: [...] practices, and ideas that could be significant for education. This year's re[...] * Links o 2009 Horizon Report (367k PDF) o 2009 Horizon Resources (tagged hz09 in delicious) o Horizon Project Wiki o NMC Horizon Project Table of Contents 1. Executive Summary (0) 2. Technologies to Watch (0) 3. Key Trends (0) 4. Critical Challenges (0) 5. The Horizon Project (0) 6. One Year or Less: Mobiles (0) 7. One Year or Less: Cloud Computing (0)

A list of links to support the use of Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning in the K-12 environment. (There are many items here, so be sure to visit the additional pages or choose to see 100 items from the bottom of the page.)

Very impressive presentation maker - must get invite (in beta stage).

So, educators, I am interested to know how you have used Wordle in your classrooms or as part of your work. I must favour visual learning, as I find visualisation tools such as Wordle, as well as SearchMe, Search Cube, Tag Galaxy and Many Eyes very useful. If they suit me as a learner, they must suit some of my students as well. I'll acknowledge the flipside of my argument and point you to Dy/Dan's post on Wordle as nothing more than eye-candy and time-filler. Maybe it is no more than engagement-on-the-cheap, but if it works, why discount it? You can decide for yourself. Here are some ways that I have utilised Wordle:

Blogging helps encourage teen writing Survey reveals that student bloggers are more prolific and appreciate the value of writing more than their peers

Based on extensive research, Cisco, Microsoft, and Intel concluded that most education systems have not kept pace with the dramatic changes in the economy and the skill sets that are required for students to succeed. These skills include the ability to think critically and creatively, to work cooperatively, and to adapt to the evolving use of information and communications technology (ICT) in business and society.

ZoomIt is screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. I wrote ZoomIt to fit my specific needs and use it in all my presentations. ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs.