Barry Dahl dot com

Desperately searching for a blog post. How about this one? Here are five tools from my Personal Learning Environment toolkit that seem to be either little known, fairly new, or both.

1. Now that I am using a Mac part-time, I have started using Nambu as my Twitter client. I like it a lot. Since I typically use two screens, I am able to have one screen filled with at least four columns of Twitter goodness – such as a) my Twitter home page (messages from those I follow), b) Tweets where I am mentioned by others, including replies, c) direct tweets that are sent to me privately, and d) those messages I have sent, or my favorites, or a search column, or anything I want in that last column.
2. I continue to use and am increasingly impressed by the DimDim web conferencing service. We briefly installed the open source version on campus but took it down since we didn’t have time to make it fully operational. I’m hoping to get that back up fairly soon. In the meantime, using the service from their site works very well. They keep turning out enhanced features and their commitment to open source makes them a company that I very much choose to deal with.
3. I wrote a post recently over at Desire2Blog about Screencastle, a new free, web-based, screen recording tool. It juts works. I like it and recommend it. You don’t even need to create an account – in fact, you can’t.
4. The more I get to know Prezi, the more I like it. It is a web-based presentation tool that allows for non-linear data representation and all kinds of cool stuff. Because it is so NOT-PowerPoint, it does take a while to break your thinking out of the confines of traditional slideware. Here is a sample presentation where I turned my bio info into a Prezi. You’ll notice that it is still somewhat linear – I’m working on that.
5. My Mindomo map of Web 2.0 tools has become increasingly valuable to me when making presentations about Web 2.0 goodness. Here is that mindmap – click  on the plus signs to expeand each section. Then there are either further expansions possible or links to the tool websites and examples.

Filed under: Web2.0 |