Two free eBooks about teaching with new Web 2.0 tools

I ran across two very good ebooks about teaching with some of the newest Web 2.0 tools. These tools are actually Cloud Computing based tools that are free to use, as are the ebooks.  Michael Zimmer is the author of both books. The ebooks are short and only take a few minutes to flip through. They are hosted on a site called issue.com, another cloud app that allows you to publish ebooks like these.

Open Ed Disc

If you haven't heard of the Open Education Disc or Open Disc read on.  There is an overwhelming volume of open and free software applications available for anyone to explore out there but what educator has the time or experience to harvest that effectively.  The people behind the Open Disc have done a great service to all educators.  Basically, they have surveyed what open software applications are out there and selected the best that could be used to meet the needs of students and teachers and assembled them on one Disc, which is now a DVD. And the list of free applications is great.  You can see the list at http://www.theopendisc.com/education/

iPad Review

The Apple iPad has been available in Canada for a week now but I have had one to try out for about three weeks.  I have had a lot of people ask me if I would buy one and No, I would not. For the following reasons:

• Too expensive - for the low end price of $550, you could get a real pretty computer real computer. Or get an iPod Touch for less than half of that. 

EtherPad Clones

Etherpad is a very interesting tool for collaboratively writing on the web without anyone having to register and set up accounts.  It has some wonderful features to make this easy but Google has decided to take it off-line.  But Google has allowed its code to be shared and so there are several clone sites appearing on the web.  Click here to see a list of clone sites.

Mashpedia - The Real-Time Encyclopedia

Here is another gem that Leon shared with me. Mashpedia claims to be a real-time encyclopedia.  What it really is is a meta search tool.

On the front page you can see what are current news items, trending topics, people and brands. And you can see links to the current movies out.

When you enter a search string in the search field what Mashpedia does is searches the following sites with that search string, which is also what is does if you click on any of the links on the front page: