21stcenturyed.com

Yep – Google makes everything better. Even Google searching itself.
Check out Google’s Wonder Wheel here.

Tools - Courtesy of ParaScubaSailor at http://www.flickr.com/photos/parascubasailor/3255022846/

• Jing: Bar none, the best way to produce a short training video (“short” because it only records 5 minutes or less of video). It’s also a bad-ass screenshot program, letting you immediately add shapes and text to the screen grab before you save it. I also love that you don’t even have to save the darn screenshots – you can choose to copy them directly to your clipboard. Once your screenshot or video is complete, you can immediately – and I do mean immediately – upload it to YouTube or other sharing sites. Buy the pro version, and you can add your webcam image to your recordings and save them as MPEG-4s.
• ScreenCast: Like peanut-butter and jelly, nothing goes better with Jing than ScreenCast. Just one of the video-sharing options on Jing, I like becuase you can section off private and public folders, have total control over the frame graphics and options around your video, accept comments on your vids and even add attachments to go along with them.
• PowerPoint: I know it’s overused and maybe a bit cliche, but c”mon – there’s not an easier way to quickly pull together a professional looking presentation.
• Udutu: I don’t hear a lot about them being used elsewhere, but I really like Udutu. It uses PowerPoint-esque templates to let you put together SCORM-compliant lessons in a matter of minutes. They offer paid hosting, but it’s free to export the lessons and courses you create and you can host them yourself (which is what I do).
• Building Surveys With Google Docs: There’s not much sense in training if you never find out if what you’ve done was successful. Throw together a quick survey using Google forms and docs. Then slap that link at the end of everything you do – but don’t forget to review the results occassionally and allow the results to impact what you do.

Ok – I really like(d) iGoogle. I get it. You can create a page with widgets that complete customize and populate your homepage with everything you need/want on a daily basis. But if you have used iGoogle you may have found it – as I have – to be rather clunky and slow to load. I’m not entirely sure why – though I suppose it is due to all of the API’s fighting with your browser to display their important info.

Me? I’ve switched to using a Google site as my home page. I have populated the left-hand nav with a text box that houses all of my most frequently used links. I plugged in a To Do list widget in a Dashboard page, along with my Google calendar. I then synched my Google calendar with my work Outlook email and added that to the Dashboard – last step was to make the Dashboard page be the landing page for the site (see Site Settings>>Other Stuff).

So – iGoogle was disappointing for me – but at least Google provided the next best thing!

Do you have a better way to organize your important daily stuff? Let me – and the other readers – know! Post!