TOP 10 TOOLS 2009
Simon Crook

My name is Simon Crook; I am the Secondary eLearning Adviser for the Catholic Education Office Sydney Southern Region - I am responsible for helping the staff of 16 secondary schools integrate technology in their teaching practices, particularly now the Australian Federal Government is funding a National 1-to-1 program for years 9-12 (there’s a lot of scared teachers out there now that overnight Y9 all have laptops)

Simon's Top 10 Tools as at 7 November 2009

1. Xtranormal – creating is the highest order term in Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Xtranormal allows for this in a fun, Web 2.0, easy-to-use fashion. Awesome for film study in English with the different camera angles but also great in every other subject
2. Voki – again, facilitates much creativity and personalising. Excellent for Languages and also very successful in accessing Special Needs students
3. Ning – crudely its safe (for teachers) Facebook. Kids adapt to it immediately and being able to embed, particularly widgets in a ergonomic social network environment is proving very successful
4. Twitter (#1 for my personal learning) – by following a few key people I can keep myself up-to-date with the latest resources, publications and links in an efficient manner as well as facilitate the sharing of learnings amongst my schools e.g. tweeting from conferences, staff meetings etc.
5. Delicious – my big push for 2009 even though its been around for a few years. By pushing Delicious I am ensuring departments store their bookmarks online and are sharing with students, staff, other departments and other schools
6. YouTube – so many great resources sitting there. Now we’ve removed the blocks staff and students are benefitting
7. Google Maps – great for Geography obviously but also Religious Education, History, English and anything with a journey
8. Creative Commons – my next big push for the responsible use by staff and students of other people’s work
9. Scootle – an Australian educational repository with lots of resources. Particularly good are the flash animated activities for all subject areas
10. Wordle – I was worried this was a bit twee but is being used for everything from glossaries to word clouds to statistical analysis of texts to reviewing student texts (e.g. a term being over-used)