Something I forgot in the Webtools Media section: VLC Media Player

A colleague just asked what application would be good for converting certain types of video files (without using an on-line tool) and my first thought was to have a look at the web tools site to check out VLC.

For some reason I had forgotten to include this excellent bit of software from the VideoLan organisation when I transferred links from the previous site! So I've added this back in now and am here giving it a bit of extra promotion because it is very simple and very good. Admittedly, you don't get all the bells and whistles and lovely graphics of Windows Media Player but it does what it says on the bollard, I mean, tin.

Whilst it's not really a 'web tool' it is a tool and you do get it from the web and you may well find it pretty damn useful so it should be included in the Media section which is where I shall now add it.

Web tools update

New additions on the Web tools site:

penzu a delightful and delightfully simple to use note, blog, write it down tool with lots of extra uses

101 a simple app which makes sending SMS to pupils and parents easy and safe

lingro very cool on-line dictionary, 11 languages and facilities for web translation

QR codes make your QR code images and links

meetings.io video conference as simple as it can be - just share a url!

myna remix music tracks, collaborate, record your own voice

Schoology a nice place to view and share teaching resources with extra features too for your own classes

BrainNook
SccotPad
ConceptBank
three apps featured on the Schoology site but which have appeal individually for maths and language, common core subject activities

yola nice all-on-line web site building with no code knowledge required and almost invisible advertising

It's Showtime for Maths, ICT and English. At the Royal Albert Hall!

There's a great set of resources available at My Resource Cloud. They look ideal for anyone looking to make Functional Skills a bit more interesting, covering Maths, English and ICT with guidance in videos from real staff at the Royal Albert Hall as to the work involved in putting on and promoting a new show.



The complete set of resources are free, charity-commissioned and designed and developed by Bongo LLP, available for PC and Mac computers.

Download the software at this link.

Some of the illustrative shots of kids taken as if from up a ladder with an odd lens and an unfortunate freeze frame on the video summary above might benefit from a little adjustment as well as some spelling! Very classy stuff for all that, though and should provide many teachers next term with a good few weeks' worth of ready-made and modern activities.

BLT! I like that. (The new webtools site).

Once upon a time there was ILT. Then it became e-learning or elearning and now it's . . . well . . . both and yet neither one nor the other. I've always liked information learning technology. It says it all - technology, learning, information. I suppose it could be argued that NLN got it right with their Learning Technology team, of which I was a member for a while. E-learning has always confused people and required us to spend the first 20 minutes defining it at the start of sessions and our colleagues from other parts of the planet think e-learning is distance learning or variations on the theme anyway. Which is fine too but all this hyphenated stuff is very 90s now. If you have to think up a term to describe something then your time's better used thinking up ways to use it. So I'm going back to ILT and good old web tools. Oh, hang on, they're apps now. Back to Square One.

Whatever it's called, we want tutors to use IT. Students expect it. They like accessing notes, tasks and anything they missed and want to look at again in their own home, with a friend or just somewhere other than the classroom at 9am. Or the library where they can't make any noise. Or the IT Workshop where they need the ID card they've forgotten and the computers probably don't have their familiar software, especially browsers, anyway.

All that's needed is to get a baseline of course materials on-line somewhere, make them look attractive, quick to load and simple to find. There are lots of great tools out there to make using learning technology easy for even the least enthusiastic tutor.

I've updated the webtools site and it's now all about what I'm going to call BLT. Brilliant learning technology. What you can do now is amazing and there's not a moodle upload or log-in in sight! The concept's unchanged: office-type, planning, research, media and web design applications listed in categories. All are free and almost all ad free. You are encouraged to review them, make comments and these you can now do using forms on most pages. I've dropped the PBworks wiki pages for this as it was quite hard work adding new pages both there and on the site plus links between them for every new entry. Instead, I'm using Google forms which will publish responses through the site. Good examples people have supplied of apps in action I shall retain and make links to them on the appropriate pages. The wiki will stay but I'll redevelop it as it is one of my favourite BLTs in its own right.

So, go and get your images sorted out and resized, find or even make a video, add them to some cool web pages showing students how to be really smart in their research so they can complete your course for which, of course, you have put everything on-line somewhere, haven't you. Ah, forgot . . you'll need to plan all that but, yes, there'll be a tool for that!

Enjoy the new site!

I keep remembering things I forgot to include

. . . in the new Webtools site, that is. Think I might call it Webtools2.0 for a while because I'm doing an event soon with a worrying title that includes the words Web2.0 technologies. Ah, but that would then imply that I know what web2.0 is which I'm not sure I do. Hmmm. The point is I spent many nights burning the old midnight oil on this and you ought to have a look at least. Only published it a couple of days ago and there have been 930 page views already which beats anything else I've done so hopefully someone somewhere got inspired and will be making a better impression in class after the break.

I can just see it now: that usually apparently ICT-illiterate old lecturer who normally heaves the OHT from the window cill and passes that huge pile of still-warm photocopies of some book pages to the poor lad whose name just happens to land him in the front row left or right and the next ten minutes are taken up by the sound of transparencies slithering around and notes being passed around - but this time he walks in, naked, in a manner of speaking and drops a url into the stunned silence or slaps a really smart-looking web page on the screen. "How did you do that, Sir?" someone asks. The emphasis could be on any of the first five words.

There's the usual brief descriptions of what things with mostly pretty odd names and pastel logos are supposed to do and I'm hoping that people will use the Comment links to add something about what they might to or even have done. That bit's possible thanks to a wiki - pbwiki are really making life easy in that respect - and one or two other interactive features courtesy of Google's Notes and Labpixies' Todo list.

And yes, I'm sure I'll have omitted someone's favourite - so don't whinge, just tell me and I'll do my best to remember to add it. Incidentally, there's something called the Curriculum Champs list here in the UK where some really clever people recently listed their choices of software and I've tried to include as many of their suggestions. Trouble was, over half of them were quite expensive things so I couldn't include them. All the stuff I've added is free, almost entirely ad-free and most of it doesn't need any special knowledge or complicated downloads / installations but works on the web wherever you happen to be.

Hope you find something inspiring.

Coffee: for a few dollars free

The boys at CoffeeCup have been making fun tools for web design for years but I didn't make more than occasional use of them having Dreamweaver for most of what I needed at the time and most were only free for a limited period. Period expires and that's that. The regular mailings continued which I ignored until I got one about a web album which was pretty smart and, before discovering JAlbum, I decided it was worth the few dollars and went to their site to buy it. There I spotted an offer to buy everything they do for just a few dollars more and their marketing worked.

In the long list of software I can now use I found some interesting items, some I don't understand, one or two a bit odd but some more that I have been using, including a nice CSS Style Sheet maker, something that makes putting videos on your web site a cinch, an RSS news feed reader and several others which have definitely been helpful and avoided long sessions of trying to figure out how to do things in Dreamweaver. But this post isn't intended as a sales pitch for them. You should know that I like free stuff and try to avoid recommending anything that costs money - and I'm not about to break the habit now. You see, a week or two later I had an e-mail asking whether I'd like to be something grand like a CoffeCup Ambassador. Naturally, my vain side said "Yes, if it's free." and then I get an invitation to apply for the whole shooting match for free for use by students at the College. I filled in the form expecting it to be restricted to US only (as so many offers seem to be) or to find a catch but, no, I got approved and now have a CD with all the stuff on and permission to spread it around College machines liberally.

Naturally, I can where they're going: get the kids hooked and then sell 'em the set. With that wealth warning, however, I am quite looking forward to giving people an alternative to Dreamweaver and some genuinely fun and easy tools to play with. I may even learn from some of the smarter students what to do with the more strange-looking things!

I don't know if the offer's still there but why not contact CoffeeCup and ask? And any firm that substitutes "Cool" for "OK" on the button deserves a mention in my book!