We had a great seminar at my newspaper about new “free” tools on the web for blogging, social networking, etc. These tools can be easily integrated into a lesson. Your classes will love them.

Ebeddr

About it: http://embedr.com/page/faq

Google Maps

Utterli

Utterli lets you share text, pics, video and audio with your friends, even from your mobile phone.

Delicious

Save and share your bookmarks online.

Xfruits

No idea what this is for.

Scribd

Seems kind of like a YouTube for literature.

Twitter

This is the website’s explanation: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

But it seems most people use it to market themselves. Just another way to blast your stuff around, in messages of less than 140 characters.

Swivel

About Us

Mission
Swivel’s mission is to make data useful so people share insights, make great decisions and improve lives.

In an era of spin, opinion, and apathy about statistics, Swivel is a Web site that makes it easy for everyone to collaborate and explore data together — because better informed people make better decisions: in voting booths, in corporate boardrooms and at neighborhood meetings.

We believe data is most valuable when it’s out in the open where everyone can see it, debate it, have fun, and share new insights. Swivel is applying the power of the Web to data so that life gets better.

Many Eyes

This is how the site explains itself. (I think they need a copy-editor)

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE’s Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

We all deal with data that we’d like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.

Ning

Create your own social network.

Slideshare

Vodpod

Your favorite videos on the web, in one place.

Save videos you like as you surf the web, or search to find them on Vodpod.

Our widgets let people watch videos you save on your blog, website, Facebook, Myspace or just about anyplace.

Widgetbox

Widgetbox is the leading self-service web widget platform. Every day, we help millions of people express, connect, create, and inform using web widgets. Web widgets are mini, portable-applications that can be added to any web page and serve two important goals:

Add Dynamic Content to Your Site
Reach New Users Across the Web

What’s a widget: Widgets are simple, fun, and useful applications that can be embedded on a webpage or blog.

Yahoo! Pipes

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

· combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.

· geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.

· power widgets/badges on your web site.

· grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

Flickrslidr

What?

flickrSLiDR allows you to easily embed the classic flickr slideshows on your website or blog. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group you would like to embed along with some options. You’ll receive the HTML embed code in return.

I want to begin by coming clean with one simple truth. I am not a technology guru. I am a career communicator/ writer and teacher who is working hard distinguish the between what is helpful and distracting. This blog is all about sharing what we know is useful and exchanging ideas and discoveries about tools and web sites that will help us in what we do. With the growing demands on teachers, time is not on our side, but technology is. Let’s tap into it. Together.

So if you stumble upon a site or a tool. Share it and tell us how it helped you. We’ll do the same.