Steve Yuen is a
Professor of Technology Education at The University
of Southern Mississippi (USM) in the United States.
He joined USM since 1984 and developed a new Master
of Science in Instructional Technology program in
1998. Steve served as the program leader for the
Instructional Technology program at USM for eight
years until 2006 and has taught numerous graduate
and undergraduate courses on a wide-variety of
technically-advanced subjects. Steve was a Senior
Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan in 1992-1993 and was
named “2002 Mississippi Technology Educator of the
Year” by Mississippi Educational Computing
Association. He was the past president of Chinese
American Educational Research and Development
Association (CAERDA), the Founding President of
Society of International Chinese in Educational
Technology (SICET), as well as a board of director
of Mississippi Educational Computing Association (MECA).
His current research interests are: e-learning 2.0,
educational technologies for new generations, mobile
computing for learning and instruction, Web 2.0 and
social computing for learning. Please feel free to
visit his
Web site as well as his blog
Tech Learning to find out what he is doing.
Steve's Top 10 Tools as at 22
January 2008
Firefox. My favorite browser. It is
customizable with a great collection of
extensions, plug-ins and add-ons. It is fast
and more secure way to surf the Web.
Wordpress. A great open-source software
for creating blogs. I use Wordpress for my blog
which is hosted by Wordpress.com for free.
Wordpress provides a variety of attractive
themes, plug-ins, and widgets.
Slideshare. A fantastic Web 2.0 tool that
lets students and instructors to upload their
presentations and share them online through a
YouTube-like interface. Also, it is a good
place to discover presentations and slideshows
from others.
Ning. An excellent online service where I
create and customize my own Social Network for
students in my classes. Ning has customizable
themes and templates. Also, it offers a public
or private option.
Wetpaint. A great place to create a free
wiki that can be a private or public site.
Wetpaint Education Wikis are Ad-free for
teachers and students.
Google Docs. A web-based word processing,
spreadsheet, and presentation program that makes
collaboration more efficient. It is a free
online creation tool which is great for teachers
and students. Also, Google Docs allows mobile
access.
del.icio.us. A social bookmarking site
that allows me to store bookmarks on the Web
instead of inside my Web browser. Also, I use
del.icio.us to share bookmarks with students,
colleagues, friends, family, and the del.icio.us
community.
Camtasia. A powerful screencasting software
that I use frequently to create instructional
videos for my students. Camtasia allows screen
recordings, audio, voice narration, PowerPoint,
Picture-in-Picture and webcam video. Also, I can
edit and enhance my video with callouts, titles,
credits, zooming, panning, quizzes and
additional audio tracks.
VoiceThread. A Web-based
digital-storytelling application that enables me
to share my stories or slideshows through audio,
images, videos, or text with others online.
VoiceThread allows visitors to make comments on
my stories or slideshows in: voice with a
microphone, voice with telephone, text, audio
file, and video with a webcam. I have used the
VoiceThread as an online discussion tool in my
class and it works quite well.
Skype. A great telecommunication tool that
lets me use my own PC to make free
voice-over-Internet and video calls to my
students and colleagues (who are the Skype users
as well) anywhere in the world.
.
What are your
Top 10 tools for learning? Let us know and help to build the
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008
