Microsoft Live Moviemaker

Here in college the Microsoft video editing tool MovieMaker disappeared briefly from the network in the upgrade to Windows 7, and has only now become available again.  The new Live MovieMaker incarnation is easier to use than the old one, and also can deal with files from the later  Flip videocams  again!  Well worth a look.  College colleagues can find it in the Audio, image and video editing tools within All programs.  For Windows users it is also available for free download at home.  But hey, I should be practising what I preach...

Pronouncing words with real life examples

If you are teaching English you may be interested in this interesting mashup put together by embedplus, of a kind of dictionary and YouTube put together:
http://www.embedplus.com/dictionary/how-to-pronounce-words-and-use-them.aspx

Search for a word, and you  will get pronunciation, but also YouTube video exemplars of real usage of the word.  What's really clever is that the video will jump to the bit of the video with the word being used.  It's not always just what you want, (I get an icehockey clip for the word "offside" rather than UK football) and sometimes you have to wait a little bit for the videos to appear, but excellent for students wanting to see and hear real life usage of vocabulary.

Curating the web: flipboard

Curation is one of those words that have morphed from having a layer of dust on them, barely used apart from in very dry academic sense, into a fashionable trend .  It is a recognition of the fact that in order to make sense of the avalanche of information we now have to deal with we need to be selective in the sources we pay attention to , and do some work to assemble them.  So it's a way of putting together information from your chosen feeds, social media, blogs etc into in attractive readable format, that at least on tablet devices often resembles a good old paper magazine! Having been inspired by James Clay's review of Flipboard (that had started purely as an iPad app) I put the free Flipboard app onto my humble old iPod touch, and was really impressed with the usability and visual quality it produces. I particularly like the errr... flip functionality! (You might also like to experiment with Scoop.it, that has pc and mobile apps)