What's the plan for the day?

Over the past few years, there's been an explosion of free tools on the net, with many that have great applications for us in education! There are too many to choose from, and it's hard for us to know which ones might be useful to us as educators - and worth the significant investment of time.

I'm hoping that through the activities today we'll be ready to use one or two useful tools in our day-to-day lives. In outline, our day will be as follows:

Get our hands dirty (10:30-11:30)
We'll start the day by getting our hands dirty with a number of tools. Not an in-depth review of the different tools, we'll just have a taste of a number of tools as if we were students in a class where they were used. Hopefully this'll also include some practical ideas about how to introduce students to these tools.

We'll be having some fun with:

• Email groups
• ToDo lists for you and your students
  
• Editing a Wiki page
• Using Bloglines with blogs
  
• Depending how keen we are, we might also have a play with Google Calendar, del.icio.us and a few other tools.
  

A real-life example of these tools in action (11:30-12:15)
We'll take a tour of a current course where these tools are being used by students, seeing what works well and discussing some of the dangers to watch out for.

Getting started with one or two tools
After lunch we'll be getting our hands dirty again, but this time, planning and creating our own tools for use in our own classes and lives.

The first thing we'll do is setup our Practical Tools email group to see how easy it is to communicate with our classes (or friends!).