Good morning all!

Seems we are busier than ever these days. Whether you’re a “newbie” or a seasoned veteran, “keeping up” is a LOT of work, and something many of us obsess about. You can rely on your PLN, to be sure, but you also need resources you can use on your own to stay abreast of the latest and greatest tools.

One such OUTSTANDING resource I learned about recently (thank you, Elizabeth Helfant) is the Web 2.0: Cool Tools for Schools wiki – http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/.

This beauty of a site does a terrific job of categorizing and presenting many important, robust and usually FREE web 2.0 tools for classroom use. Maintained by Lenva Shearing, ICT PD Facilitator at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School in Auckland, New Zealand, Cool Tools for Schools is a visually pleasing, well organized, comprehensive directory of web 2.0 tools. Drilling down into any of the catgegories results in a detailed listing with explanations, like this:

The list isn’t perfect – I need to email Lenva about http://textthemob.com/ so she can add it to the page above (the more we share with her, the better the collection becomes). It’s one of the best directories I’ve ever found, and, it’s a lot easier to comprehend than the Mother of All Web 2.0 tool sites, Go2Web20.net:

I like http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/ because you can use it when you need it and quickly see what’s available. (Lenva, you might want to consider putting together a Google Form for people to submit new sites, it would be a lot easier than email!)

Hope this helps!

-kj-