TOP 10 TOOLS 2007 & 2009
Russel Tarr

Russel is Head of History at the International School of Toulouse, France. He is author of the award-winning website www.activehistory.co.uk and is an administrator of the history teachers’ discussion forum at www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum. Russel is particularly interested in the use of online games and simulations as tools for learning. Russel tweets at @russeltarr

Russel's Top 10 Tools as at 30 May 2009

1. Classtools.net : Teachers and students can create their own educational online games and activities with a whole range of Flash templates that can be saved for future editing and embedded into your own blog / website. No passwords or login required. Great for revision activities especially.

2. Xtranormal.com: Students type up a dialogue on a topic of their choice, then turn it into an animated movie with the click of a button using this fantastic tool. A variety of characters, voices and settings makes this a big hit with classes of all ages.

3. Etherpad: Realtime collaborative text tool. Students can write, edit, compare points of view, have online debates. I get some students putting the account into the past tense, others adding positive bias, others adding negative bias – all at the same time. I also use it during exam leave for students to leave questions for me to answer – this is better than email because the other students then get the benefit too.

4. Prezi: Next generation presentation software. Like PowerPoint for the 21st century. The strong visual focus of the "canvas" approach produces much more engaging presentations that the "slides" of PowerPoint – which, let's face it, usually produce the same effect as "pages" in a book.

5. Wordle: Input some text, then get a highly visual "word cloud" illustrating which words are most frequently used. Throws out some very interesting results when used with famous speeches, poems, constitutional documents.

6. Animoto: Upload a bunch of images with one click; add a soundtrack with another, and a final click creates a powerful movie. Captions can be added along with narrative. Easy for students to use and the results are fantastic.

7. Mind42: The best of many collaborative mindmapping applications. The fact that students can simultaneously develop the same mindmap is great, especially when you can all view the results developing on an interactive whiteboard.

8. Delicious: Still my favourite social bookmarking tool. Increasingly I am "subscribing" to key terms (e.g. "web2.0") so that I am immediately being alerted of sites being bookmarked by others. This is in many ways a more valuable way of searching than using Google, since Delicious only lists those sites which have been bookmarked by others – often with comments

9. Google Reader: I follow literally dozens of blogs from educators, and the only way to keep on top of them is to subscribe to the RSS feed of each blog in Google Reader – which allows me to view all of the updates to all of those blogs on one page each morning. The alternative (visiting each blog individually) would simply be too time consuming.

10. Twitter: This has transformed by experience of the web. If you build up a network of like-minded educators, you will quickly gain access to a massive amount of expertise and find links to resources which might otherwise have passed you by. A tool such as Tweetdeck is the best way of making good use of the site: it's simple to "prune" your network of those people who don't contribute much apart from a regular update about the state of their garden.

Russel's Top 10 Tools as at 19 August 2007

1. Classtools.net : Create your own educational online games and activities with a whole range of Flash templates that can be saved for future editing and embedded into your own blog / website.

2. Bubbl.us : A fantastic collaborative mindmapping application, freely available online.

3. ContentGenerator.net : Allows teachers and students to create Flash games and quizzes

4. Dynamic Drive : Snippets of code to put into web pages to add more interactivity – polls, animations and so on.

5. Flash Kit : Editable Flash movies which are great for learning how to get to grips with this application.

6. Puzzlemaker : An oldie but a goldie – create your own crosswords at the click of a button.  A nice way of spicing up an old paper test.

7. del.icio.us : An incomparable way of sharing bookmarks with fellow educators. I am del.icio.us/russeltarr - feel free to add me to your network!

8. Leech Video : Installs a tool in your browser so that with a single click you can download videos directly from YouTube for offline storage and viewing.

9. Wimpy FLV player : Ties in with number [8] – videos downloaded from YouTube will be in .flv format (Flash video). This little piece of freeware allows you to play the videos on your computer.

10. FindSounds : An awesome search engine dedicated purely and simply to finding sound files – much like YouTube does for video.