1) Del.icio.us – This social bookmarking engine serves the very basic function of organizing and sharing key web resources. It connects people to troves of websites that are tagged, described and organized by users. An additional benefit is the subscription option of an RSS feed on every page so you never miss your favorite resource.
2) Bloglines and GoogleReader – Top choices for feed aggregation; a must have for sifting and sorting data and sites. With both, you can see who else has subscribed to a blog, your school site, follow your name, and have current information delivered directly to you.
3) Flickr – Flickr is clearly the premiere social photo sharing site of the Web 2.0 world. It is packed with 2.0 features like RSS throughout, contacts, comments, groups, geotagging, and of course an Open API. There are few sites with more hacks and extensions available to them. My personal favorites are Spell with Flickr, Memry, and the entire Flickr Toys collection. Additionally, the ability to do search for Creative Commons images that students actually have the rights to use in their presentations and digital stories is invaluable.
4) Picnik – There are a plethora of image editing sites in the world of Web 2.0, but Picnik stands out for several reasons. The site is well laid out, easy to navigate, and incredibly intuitive. You can use the website without even registering, making it incredibly education-friendly. A key feature is the ability to import directly from Flickr, and export to a variety of services including Flickr, Photobucket and Kodak Easyshare.
5) Video Editing – There are tons of free video editing sites and resources readily available for the novice and experienced video user. Sites like iMovie and Movie Maker allow you to easily edit and manage video content.
6) Podcasts or recordings – Free tools like Audacity, evoca, podbean, gabcast, odeo , and one of my favorites, gcast, makes uploading easy. Anybody can upload audio files, organize them into a single or multiple podcast feeds, and then generate a flash player that is incredibly easy to embed into a blog or web site. The flash player includes subscription links, allowing listeners to subscribe via iTunes or email.
7) Google Docs and Spreadsheets – This is Googles version of Work and Excel, with a lot more opportunity. Each day Google adds new features making it easy to create and coillate data in individual and collaborative ways. While editing a document, you can invite other people to work on it with you. Windows or Mac, Firefox or Explorer, Docs and Spreadsheets has everything you’d expect in a word processor and spreadsheet program. Throw in the ability to import and export in a variety of formats, including Office, OpenOffice, and PDF, and you have a full featured replacement for zero cost.
Online Classroom Environments/Networks/Forums – Ning, Neetz, Lefora Backchannels – tinychat, backnoise, coveritlive. You can take things a step farther and stream live with tools like
Private Videocast or TV Channel
e="font-size: 12pt;"> – Ustream, Livestream, Youcastr.
9) & 10) pbWiki & WikiSpaces – Both sites are decided that they both deserved roster spots on this list. pbWiki is a little shinier, with it’s new point and click editor and template that’s easy on the eyes. You can also save your wikis as a PDF or create a slide show from it, unusual amongst wiki engines. Wikispaces is firmly committed to education and is in the process of giving away 100,000 ad-free wikis to educators. It has a simple WYSIWYG editor that does support embedable media (like from YouTube or Google Video). Wikispaces looks more like a typical wiki engine, and even has a discussion tab.
