TOP 10 TOOLS 2008
Richard Allaway

I am the Head of Geography at the International School of Toulouse and the author of geographyalltheway.com.  Every student of secondary school age at the International School of Toulouse has their own laptop computer.  This allows me to fully integrate a wide range of technologies into my daily teaching.

Richard's Top 10 Tools as at 15 March 2008

1. geographyalltheway.com - The production of my own teaching website aimed at the teaching of Key Stage 3 geography, IGCSE Geography and IB Geography has revolutionized my teaching.  It acts as an organizational tool, it holds all my resources in one easy to access location and the nature of it's use allows me to review and redevelop resources and lessons on a nearly daily basis.
2. del.icio.us  - I love del.icio.us.  The ability to have all my bookmarks (currently over 3500) online and easily accessible from both home and from work is indispensable.  The easy of integration with geographyalltheway.com and the sharing dynamic are top features of this essential service. My bookmarks can be seen here: del.icio.us/geographyalltheway
3. Remember the Milk - Organizing tasks whether it is something minor like mending a broken link on geographyalltheway.com or major work deadlines I use 'Remember the Milk' to organize what I need to do and when I need to do it.  Integrates fantastically with iGoogle as well!
4. Google Reader - My daily reading of news, blogs, technology, updates, geography - it all gets delivered to my Google Reader account.
5. Google Calendar - Google Calendar is my diary and lesson planner.  Syncs with iCal as well - great!
6. Flickr - A gold-mine of images to illustrate geographical teaching.
7. ClassTools.net - Lesson starters, plenaries, revision quizzes all easily produced and integrated into webpages.  My favorite ClassTool has to be the 'Random Name Generating Fruit Machine'.
8. Firefox - Customizable, plug-ins, tabbed browsing and fantastic integration with my del.icio.us links and account.
9. YouTube - 'Clip Culture' is here.  Embedding links into geographyalltheway.com to illustrate geographical topics to my students means more focused teaching as it makes it easier to watch short examples rather than whole program episodes.
10. Slideshare - The hosting of PowerPoints that can be shared with others and embedded into webpages - a very tidy service.