I am Teacher Community Coordinator for English360  – a free web-based platform for teachers. I help educators provide personalised Business English learning programmes to meet their student and customer needs. I collaborate with and supports Business English language teachers all over the world to help them publish and share lesson and courses for blended or online delivery.

Valentina's Top 10 Tools as at 26 October 2009

1. Audacity – powerful recording tool that is with Lame encoder easily compresses to mp3, also has portable application which is helpful in overcoming firewall restrictions or editing on the go
2. Diigo – much more than social bookmarking, great for creating lists and groups around sets of links with highlighting, annotations and messaging built-in plus full privacy options and Edu accounts
3. Dimdim – complete live web-conferencing solution which lets educators join and set up “virtual” meetings in a few clicks
4. English360 - free course authoring tools for business English language teachers –beta release 26th Oct 2009. No downloads, no hosting, superb ranges of activity tools for “granular” personalised web-based learning.
5. Googledocs – collaborative writing, excellent quick solution for forms
6. Jing – easy to install and use screengrabber and screencaster. Nice UI.
7. Ning – excellent tool to set up social networks for professional development forums, events, exchanges. Can also be used as learning environment.
8. Pbworks – Great wiki tool – set up educational (Campus) wiki which allows student accounts that do not require emails. Has simple to use page, folder system that allows multimedia embeds and non-linear development of a learning/workspace
9. Skype – VoIP telephony tool that is used by millions, cheap way to call and work collaborative across time zones. Some country restrictions but excellent Group call features which allow max 24 +host to communicate in real-time, anyone in the group call and add people from their contacts to an ongoing call.
10. Voicethread – handy for group conversation around images or video. Has comment function and