I’m adding it to The Best Ways To Create Simple Screenshots.

I thought I’d put together a “The Best…” list that would provide some tools that do just that.

Of course, one key task you want to do is to back it up in case something goes wrong. You can find those tools at one of my previous lists –  The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer And Online Work.

Here are a few other applications that I’ve found helpful:

VERIFYING LINKS:

If you have a lot of links to other sites on your blog or website, it’s pretty de-energizing to students and others if lots of them are “dead” — no longer connecting to a site that exists.  I use two different free and automatic link verifiers.

One is the Any Browser Link Checker. It works easily and quickly to verify links on a page once you type-in the web address of the page you want it to check. Sometimes, though, it can’t handle a page if you have a ton of links on one, like I do on some of the pages on my website.

If you run into the same problem, then Dead Links is the tool to use. That always works, though sometimes you’ll get a fair number of “false negatives” — it’ll say a link is dead if it takes awhile to load when it really is still active.  You just have to double-check them.

BEING NOTIFIED IF YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE IS DOWN:

Two free tools work well for monitoring your sites and then notifying you if they go down for some reason.

One is Observu and the other is Ding It’s Up. Observu will tell you when it’s down. Ding It’s Up will tell you when it’s down, but it also has the nice feature of letting you know when it’s up again, too. Are My Sites Up? is a similar service, as is Montastic.

KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR SITE STATISTICS:

There are obviously lots of different tools to keep track of your site’s statistics to see who is visiting your site, and how that compares with others. There are two in particular I like.

There’s the obvious one — Google Analytics. Sue Waters’ post on The Basics Of Using Google Analytics is the place to go to learn what all that data means.

Another tool you can use to obtain data about your site, and doesn’t require any installation of code onto your site, is called Dataopedia. A post at Read Write Web describes some of its useful features.

Also, check-out the Blog Grader for data.

CHECKING TO SEE WHAT YOUR READERS SEE:

One never knows what your blog posts look like in an RSS Reader or to email subscribers, or how your website or blog looks in different browsers….unless you check.

Read Sue Waters’ post on What Do Your Readers Really SEE? to get more suggestions on this topic, including information on a site which will give you screenshots of how your blog or website will look in a zillion different browsers.

OTHER USEFUL TOOLS

Website Grader will give you a lot of helpful information about your site. All you have to do is type in your address and it will immediately give you a report with recommendations on how to make it more accessible.

Spyder Mate, Examine URL and Link Voodoo will also provide you with free overall reports on your site with similar information.

These final tools don’t quite fit into this list, but they are related.

Copy Gator, Copyscape, Fair Share and Copyright Spot all are free and easy ways to monitor if your blog content is being copied by someone else who is then billing it as their own. Nik Peachey has written a good post about them.

As always, feedback is welcome.

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Many years ago I helped operate a soup kitchen on San Jose’s (CA) Skid Row. We were well-meaning, but not the most responsible neighbors. On day I was sweeping around the passed-out men and women on our front porch when a police car drove-up. An officer got out and started yelling me, saying that we couldn’t control thing and they received many complaints about us. As the officer continued, one of the men on the porch pulled himself up on the railing and yelled out, “Officer, Larry tries. He tries hard. We just don’t listen to him!”

I’ve often thought about that incident during my nineteen year career as a community organizer and six years as a public school teacher. I’ve framed the lesson I learned that day as a question, “Do I want to be right? Or do I want to be effective?”

The issue of educational technology is, I believe, no different. Judgmental, frustrated, and angry comments can often be found in the education “blogosphere” as people share their often unsuccessful efforts at integrating ed tech into the learning and teaching culture of their schools.

In my community organizing career, I learned that a key to engaging people to move beyond their comfort zone is to first build a relationship — a reciprocal one. A relationship entails eliciting from others their hopes and dreams, along with sharing your own. It involves finding learning the frustrations and challenges that people are experiencing. It involves looking for ways to help the other person realize those hopes and dreams and get beyond those challenges. And, if educational technology can genuinely help in those ways, then building a relationship means framing the invitation to try it in a way that speaks to what the other person wants, which may not be the way you would prefer to frame it. It is the difference between “being right” and “being effective.”

Based on the conversations I’ve had with many teachers, here are some of the simple ways I’ve introduced using educational technology as tool reluctant colleagues might want to consider — after I’ve developed or deepened relationships with them.  I’ve framed the invitations based on what they’ve said they wanted, which might or might not be similar to what you learn.  Even if they are different, these “A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology” might provide a useful template for you to develop others.

When talking about using ed tech, I’ve found it important to stress two points — how it helps meet the immediate and direct self-interest of the individual teacher by making things easy and simple, and how it provides added value to the students’ learning experience.  I’ll discuss each of these “Few Ways” in that context.

1) Using a Computer Projector. One simple benefit for teachers is being able to easily show video clips without having to deal a VCR/DVD Projector, or the small size of a TV screen. It vastly increases the number of easily accessible video clips for all subject areas, even if you eliminate YouTube because it’s blocked by most school content filters. Yes, there are ways to access even those, but this post is about the easiest ways to introduce people to tech who might not be comfortable with it.

2) Using a Document Camera. Eliminating the need to make transparencies is every teachers’ dream if they’ve been using an overhead projector, and a document camera does the trick. Being able to have students bring their work up to easily show the class models is a great teaching tool.

3) Easily Creating A More Authentic Audience For Student Work. Students can be much more engaged in, and committed to, what they’re writing/creating for class if they know the audience is for more than just one person — the teacher. Here are some easy ways to make this happen:

To Make It Easily Viewable By Other Classmates:

Any document, including one in Microsoft Word, can be quickly uploaded to the Internet with File2.ws. All you do is click on your file and seconds letter you’re given an url address for it. Once you have that, though, what do you do with it to make it accessible?

There are two options, I think, that make it most feasible to a “reluctant” colleague.

One is by simply creating a free blog from Edublogs (since that is the blog host that is least likely to be blocked by school content filters) and having students past the url addresses of their own creations to the blog as a comment. Other students can leave comments in the same area making observations about their classmate’s posts. Or they can just write them on a piece of paper to share.

Another way is by having each student email their creation’s url address to the teacher. The teacher can then easily copy and paste them to something like Dinky Page, a super-easy website creation tool that doesn’t even require registration. Another option is using sites like Posterous or Moomeo, which both allow you to email what you want to appear on your website without even having to go set it up.

To Make It Easily Viewable By Others Beyond The Classroom:

There are plenty of places where students can easily copy and paste what they’ve created for class so that others throughout the world can read it.  They can also get the url addresses of what they create and post it in one of the ways just mentioned so that classmates, and the teacher, can easily see it. Students can be pretty excited at the possibility, and their level of commitment can increase.  Potential places for students to place what they write (with no added work required from the teacher) include:

Timelines is a neat tool that lets users contribute towards making “timelines” of historical events with text, photos, and videos. People can then vote on which ones they like best, though everyone’s contributions appear to remain displayed.  It’s extremely easy to contribute — much, much easier than to something like Wikipedia. Google’s Knol is also another easy place to use for the same purpose.

Students can write book reviews at Shelfari, Library Thing, and Book Army.

They can decide a question they want to learn the answer to, post it (or have another classmate post it) on one of numerous question/answer sites) and reearch and write the answer.  Good sites for this activity include Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and Wikianswers (yes, the last two are indeed different sites).

They can create their own online books at Tikatok or Tar Heel Reader.

There are numerous other options, but these are the best ones.  Readers can find more at The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience” and at The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience.”

Yes, these are all small steps. In fact, community organizers call these kinds of things “fixed-fights.” These are the small actions that have an extremely high probability of success that serve as confidence boosters to people trying something new.

The next time you’re feeling frustrated at a colleague who might be resistant to some educational technology you’re trying to introduce him/her to, why not try some relationship-building and simple confidence-boosters instead?

I particularly like these services that provide automatic back-up for all my work.  I don’t have to even think about it, and just receive daily, or even more often, reports from them confirming that my materials have been backed-up. I’m sure that there are others, though, so please leave your suggestions in the comments section of this post.

One is Mozy, which backs-up everything on my computer. And I’ve barely used half of the capacity you get for a free account. And it costs peanuts to upgrade, if necessary.

For my blogs, I use Blog Backupr.

For Twitter, I use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter account.   Surprisingly, though, I haven’t been too impressed with the ability to search my “tweets” though Google Reader’s search function.

There’s also another different kind of back-up site called BackupURL.

BackupURL lets you enter a website address and then it immediate creates a backup copy of the site with it’s own url address. All the links remain live, and when I tried it with my website I was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually copied all the pages of my site and not just the one page address I had entered.

It’s different from the other online back-up programs in that they will create a copy of a site that you can access and then “re-launch” if you lose all your data, and you have to register for them. Those also automatically update new addition.

BackupUrl sort of “takes a picture in time” and makes it immediately accessible. If you want to update it, you have to enter the site address again and get a new url address for that updated site.

It could definitely come in handy for me since very infrequently my website (with 9,000 categorized links accessible to English Language Learners) might go off-line temporarily. Having a back-url will be useful because students could just use that instead.

Feedback, of course, is always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You can read more about the site at this TechCrunch post.

You can read about the changes at TechCrunch.

Web tools like Moomeo and Posterous (which also lets you post by email, though there you can change it once it’s posted) are ideal application to introduce technology to teachers or others who are reluctant newcomers. In fact, look for an upcoming post here titled “Ten Ways To Introduce A Reluctant Colleague To Technology.”

Google Insights is a tool that allows you to map how often, and from where, people use specific search terms. TechCrunch has a useful post about it.

When I checked to see users from which countries most searched for the term “ESL,” the top three were South Korea, Cambodia, and Mongolia. When I checked on the term “EFL,” the top three were Oman, South Korea, and Poland. And when I checked “English,” the top three were Cambodia, Mongolia, and Pakistan.

I could see this site having some opportunities to create conversation in the classroom. For example, I think it could initiate an interesting conversation with Hmong students to find that the term “Hmong” was searched for most, by far, in Laos, where some Hmong still live and from where my students’ families fled. Then, when I searched for “General Vang Pao,” the most well-known leader of the Hmong here in the United States and one of several people arrested here in Sacramento last year for allegedly planning a coup in Laos, practically all the searches came from within the United States.

I have to think a little bit more about how this new tool can be used and am interested in hearing other ideas.

In addition, here are a couple of other resources for finding the most popular “search” terms:

What People Search For – Most Popular Keywords is an article that appeared almost three years ago sharing a lot places where people could find this type of info. Surprisingly enough, practically all of the links are still live, accurate, and useful.

Chromomulator is a new site that “takes the top 100 Google searches at the moment (from Google Trends) and scours the web, collecting related news, blog posts, pictures, and videos for each search. If you need to know everything about what’s hot on the net right now, the Chromomulator can tell you. Updated several times daily.”

As I mentioned earlier in this post, I’d be interested in hearing ideas on how to use these sites and their information effectively in the classroom.

In addition, the same site has a Taste Of English game that is very well-done. It does have a decidedly UK-perspective, though, so teachers and students in other countries should be aware of that prior to using the this particular activity.

Thanks to Barking Robot for the tip.

The Best Sources For Advice On Student Blogging relates to the logistics of maximizing the learning benefits of student blogging.

The Best Resources To Learn About Copyright Issues provides both teacher and student links to learn about copyright issues.

The Best Sites For Learning Online Safety contains sites that are accessible to English Language Languages where they can learn about being safe on the Web.

This “The Best…” list does not include all the suggestions I received after asking for advice on Twitter. It only contains a few links to the sites that I’ve personally found most helpful to the narrow range of questions I have (privacy guidelines for students to follow, and parent permission forms). A number of people asked me to post this list right away because they want it for the beginning of their school year, and I just didn’t have time to write a lengthy a post including everyone’s suggestions. However, I will be writing an addendum to this list as soon as I have time.

Here are my picks for The Best Teacher Resources For Online Student Safety & Legal Issues:

Tips On Blogging With Students by Sue Waters at The Edublogger, as usual, is a source of great advice on these issues.

Crista Anderson offered the blog permission form she created and uses with her students.

Weemooseus suggested a nice site titled Internet Safety for Teachers and Students.

Maryna Badenhorst has permission documents if student faces will be online.

Thanks to everybody who sent in suggestions.  As I said, I’ll be writing an addendum soon, so fee free to contribute additional sites.

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