Category: tools

Twitter is the Internet’s hottets mode of communication these days. Like all good ideas, this is crushingly simple. Type in a message of less than 140 characters. You have a group of people (your followers) who’s list of messages this is added to. Your list of messages is what everyone you follow has added in the last few hours. You leave this open in your browser (or, increasingly, on your smart phone) and read in real time what others are thinking or doing.

Originally people posted what they were doing at that moment, and you got a sense of what your acquaintances were all experiencing. More and more, people are posting interesting things they see, hear or find. It is an amazing resource when you need an answer about something you know nothing in a very short time. Ask a question, your twitter followers answer in minutes or seconds.

In class? Set up a titter account for everyone, and have your students follow you. A great way to get feedback during class (put your feed from twitter up on the class projector, your students can comment in real time on your class).  If you want a more restricted audience, try Yammer (restricted by company address, like @swu.ac.jp, I have that account), Jaiku, Plurk (with an interesting graphical interface), FriendFeed (twitter in steroids, collects stuff from all your social network sites, the upcoming twitter killer).

Amazon just came out with a new version of their eBook reader, the Kindle. It looks very nice. I wish they were available here in Japan (my guess, they will be here by the end of the year.

But another service, Google Mobile, allows you to get electronic versions of books on your cell phone. As screens on phones get easier to read, this may be something you could use to help your students maintain their reading, in places like bus stations and trains. Google just added 1.5 million new books.

Read here about why the paper book is pretty much doomed to a very small niche market in the very near future.

This poll took me about 45 seconds to make, including the time I needed to sign up for an account at Micropoll. This simple little tool is often called a “widget” on the Internet, and many sites allow you to add widgets to their pages. Let’s try one here. Sometimes the box doesn’t line up with the words on the page, but that may mean I need to read a little on the website.

I may be getting too technical, but if you have a web site, or make pages on the web, you can use this service to get quick easy feedback, and keep people interested and coming back to your site. You could even make a quiz with it. It works with cell phone, but unfortunately, now, only in the US.