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TOP 10 TOOLS 2008
Mark Hoffmann
I
am Associate Professor of Biblical
Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg
(Pennsylvania, USA) where I teach biblical
studies and Greek. I am seeking ways of using technology
to enhance learning for my students as well as help them to
be more connected to each other, to local communities, and
to people throughout the world.
Blog:
bibleandtech.blogspot.com Teaching home page:
www.gettysburgseminary.org/mhoffman
Mark Top 10 Tools as at
31 March 2008
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Blogger: This started about a year ago as an experiment
for me. It has turned into a significant teaching tool. When
people ask me questions, I usually post the response here. I
now set up a blog as part of my classes for students to
share/comment on work.
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FolderShare: I regularly am sharing work between my
school and home computers. I do also use a USB drive to
carry work back and forth, but FolderShare is a great work
to maintain synchronization between the computers not only
of data but of program customizations. (It is also the way I
keep my Zotero references—cf. below—synched.)
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FrontPage: I’ve created all my own web pages
for both personal and school use, and FrontPage has made it
easy. Since MS just discontinued support for FrontPage
extensions, I’m going to have to phase this one out. I’m
looking at either
MS Expression Web or
Nvu.
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GoogleReader: This is what I use to keep up with what
others are doing in my fields of interest.
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GoogleEarth: In my field of biblical studies, we are
regularly dealing with geographical details. While there are
a number of fine biblical mapping programs, the free
GoogleEarth has been great for my students. Users have
created all sorts of KML files and overlays for biblical
referencing.
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Jing:
This has been by far the fastest and easiest way to make a
video screen capture. If I want more control, I use
Camtasia Studio.
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PowerPoint: I think I have found good ways to use
PowerPoint. I will often create PDF handouts in advance of
class and post them on the course website. Students can
count on these for notes, and those with tablet PCs make
even better use of them by annotating my presentations
directly.
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SnagIt
from TechSmith: I’m always needing to make screen
captures. SnagIt works great for customizing all sorts of
captures including scrolling windows, fixed regions, etc.,
and it also makes it easy to edit any captures.
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Word:
I sometimes will share course docs with students as PDFs,
but I have found that virtually all my students can handle
MS Word DOCs.
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Zotero
plugin for Firefox: I’m using this bibliographic tool
more and more, especially now that it integrates with MS
Word.
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