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For a while now Jane Hart over at Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day has been collecting the top 10 favourite tools of a range of people involved in e-learning. These have been compiled into a top 100 from, would you believe it, a directory of over 2,000 ! Anyway, I'm proud to say that I have now also contributed my own top 10 to the collection. I think this is a great ide a so do check out the collection. The collection of 2,000 is also categorized, so if you are looking for something particular, like a tool for blogging , (there are more than 70 of those) or a Virtual World tool (there are 31 in this category alone!) then it's a great place to look. Anyway, if you'd rather not go through all those at the moment, here's a look at the 10 I submitted as my top 10 tools. Nik's Top 10 Tools as at 20 March 2008 Blogger : This is my basic essential survival tool for writing my blogs. As I look around more I realise ...

Big Think is running some really nice clips from two speakers on a range of political issues at the moment. Here's a nice taster to view with an opinion on "Is it fair to ask developing countries to go green?" The speakers are: Lawrence Tribe, an American constitutional scholar and University Professor at the Harvard Law School. He talks about such things as globalization of the law and who is responsible for fixing the environment Parag Khanna , Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation He talks about whether there is a clash of civilisations and whether the US should talk to Syria The videos are all quite short snippets even though the language level is quite high, and if you get your students to register and log in, they can then vote on whether they agree with the speaker or not. These videos could provide a good route into what can be a difficult and controversial topic t...

Flashcards have always been one of my favourite teaching tools and with the FaceinHole website I've found a place where I can quickly create my own personalised ones. The site is easy to use. You just need either an image of yourself that you can upload or a webcam that you can take a picture with. Then you choose the picture you want to put yourself into and upload your image. With a bit of resizing and colour adjustment you can have a set of your own personal flashcards in just minutes. Then you can either embed them in a webpage like these ones, have a link to them on the site or print them up to use them in class as flashcards. How to use these with students These kinds of flashcards can be used for a multitude of purposes. They are great for generating stories / personal anecdotes ( The time I met Paris Hilton etc). You can use them to practice a range of grammar structures. The ones below could all be used for 'used to' and students could either ask about the exp...

Sound Transit is a really wonderful formulation of an idea. It's not just a huge collection of Mp3 sound files from all over the world, but the sounds have been tagged by country and described and a visitor to the site can take a sound journey around the world. You just choose your country of origin, your destination and how many stops you want to make. You then get offered a choice of itineraries with stops at various destinations and descriptions of what you will hear there. You choose the one you want and then the site edits together the individual sounds to create a unique sound journey for you. You can then download your mp3 sound journey, listen to it online or send it to a friend. To try this go to the Book a Transit part of the site. It's just like booking a flight on an airline website (except that it's free and a lot more user friendly!!) Alternatively you can search the database of individual files by country, keyword or creator and just download the sounds you...

Rollmio is an ingenious new website base around the idea of user produced advertisements! The site seems to be able to get commissions for online advertisements (they're only on their forth so far, but it is a start up site), then users come along, read the brief and produce and submit an advertisement (10 - 60 second video)that should fit the brief. The advertisement that the company likes best wins a prize ($500) and there are also some runner up prizes. For more videos, rollmio.com How to use this with students This seems like the ideal site to build a project around and get your students creating and uploading their own advertisements. You could even try to win the prize for your school. You might need to do some preparation work first discussing their favourite ads what they like about the etc. Then you'll also need to do a bit of analysis of ads thinking about who the target of the ad is and the kind of profile of people the company wants to sell to etc. You could also g...