The Latest and Greatest

I went to a presentation today about stuff that's new and cool.  Here are a few items you might find interesting (bonus: most of them are free). 

http://www.rockmelt.com/ Tired of flipping back and forth between your browsing, your Facebook, your Twitter, and your RSS feed?  You can have it all with RockMelt, a browser that integrates all that fun stuff at once. Use a button to instantly add things to your RSS feed, and then see it scrolling on the side of your screen.  And your Facebook chat can run right along with. 

http://www.signupgenius.com/ Pre-made sign up forms for all sorts of things (they've got lots of education type sign ups.) You can customize them as needed, and send them via email. 

http://primarypad.com/ Collaboration central.  Create a pad and provide the link and people can join in with typed text, PDFs, or whatever they would like to include.  It sounds a lot like what you can do in Google Docs, but the real bonus here is that there is no signup or login necessary for the participants so you can run with it pretty much immediately.

http://www.tagxedo.com/ This is Wordle on 'roids.  It's the same concept of word clouds, but with far more customization options, including being able to shape the cloud itself. 

http://www.classdojo.com/ Now we're getting into the really education focused stuff.  This is totally free software specifically for tracking classroom behavior.  Set up your participants and customize it to exactly what you need and have one-click ability to track behavior in class.  Not only that, it'll track the data over time, so you can graph and see patterns at a glance.  You can also reward good behavior instantly.  And if you want to share it, that's easily done as well.

http://www.scoop.it/ - Showing your class a list of boring old links (like I'm doing here!!) can be done a better way using Scoop It.  Populate the page with different web resources, all in one place, on a visually appealing board.  It also allows users to comment and give feedback.  Sort of like Pinterest for news and content.

http://www.proust.com/ Students can create autobiographies for free (or a biography of anybody, really).  If they're writing about themselves, it gives helpful prompts, creates a timeline, and can be made into a PDF or an actual book.  The prompts are great for provoking a more detailed and structured story.

http://wufoo.com/  Building online forms is usually pretty wretched, but Wufoo makes it ridiculously simple.  As in, drag and drop simple.  Customize it to get just what you need and send it out.  Bonus:  it gives you stats once the results are in.  It's free up to 150 respondents, and after that the price is still pretty reasonable.