Useful sites (weekly)

• BuddyPress.org – WordPress Social Network Software This is social networking in a box. You can build a social network for your company, school, sports team or community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. It is completely free and open source. Unlike hosted services, BuddyPress allows you to stay in control of your site and create a totally customized, unique experience

• Lovd By Less — Open Source Social Network — Who loves you, baby? ”Open Source Social Network – New social networks launch everyday, most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto and other open source solutions. Lovd offers a free open source social network platform. Built with Ruby on Rails, Lovd is a social networking solution that has everything you need to build your community”

• Oxford Bibliographies Online Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) is a tool designed to help busy researchers find reliable sources of information in half the time by directing them to exactly the right chapter, book, website, archive, data set they need for their research. It is a springboard for new research that allows for fluid movement between texts and databases within a given institution’s collection and beyond. It is a starting point for organizing a research plan, or for preparing a writing assignment, or syllabus. The style and approach is accessible to student readers, but because of the depth of coverage it is of great use to faculty as well.

• Ning: Failures, Lessons and Six Alternatives Brief report on the move by Ning to a paid-for platform. Pros and cons as well as 6 alternatives to Ning for building a social site, some hosted, some on premises. t

• Education Resources and Publications Education Resources and Publications: find out about books and online resources published by the Department of Veterans Affairs. These resources are designed for primary and secondary schools and include information (mostly pdf’s) on ANZACS, Gallipoli, Australian Wormen in War, Prisoners of War, animals in war, Vietnam war, Investigating Australians in war & Remembrance Day 

• HTML Tutorials for the Complete Idiot 

• War and Indentity – Education – Themes A site that offers resources for teachers on everything you need for a unit on ANZAC. 

• George Ivanoff 

• How Long Does It Take To Become a “Good” Teacher? « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 

• Cool Cat Teacher Blog: What is the deal with this Ning thing? (Reflections on the End of Free Networks) tag

• Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network The people from Tech Crunch have provided 9 ways in which allow you to “do it yourself.” The “9 ways” provide you with plenty of information to start up your own social network. This site provides a lot of detailed and descriptive information with links that are very helpful and credible from other technology companies. 

• Free Technology for Teachers: Ning Ends Free Networks – Try These Alternatives The freetech4teachers crew have come up with a list of alternatives to Ning. Each application is briefly reviewed listing key features and introductory videos where available.

• World’s biggest earthquakes since 1900 – CNN.com The CNN World website has developed a terrific resource for students researching earthquakes. Showing both the biggest and most deadly earthquakes since 1900, each map has captions for each area showing date, place, magnitude and death toll. Earthquakes are presented by ranking. A very good resource to begin researching the world’s earthquakes.

• The Website of Lucy Christopher – Writer for Children and Young Adults 

• Penny Tangey 

• MapAList – Create and Manage Maps of Address Lists This is a wizard for creating and managing customized. Google maps of address lists Features include addresses come from your own Google spreadsheets; modify your address list and maps are automatically updated; done so daily, or on demand, privately – be the only viewer of your maps; or publish them and show them on any website; access the address lists and maps from anywhere. It’s easy, no code require; it’s free; download KML of your maps–export them to Google earth

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Keeping your profiles in Sync. – AtomKeep

 

 

 

 

I, like a lot of people, am now joining/using quite a number of social sites.

Today I read about AtomKeep,which is a tool that attempts to rectify the problem of keeping all your profiles up-to-date. It supports a large number of sites (Twitter, Technorati, Facebook, Digg, Ning, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, YouTube and more) and they are adding more sites all the time. Partial support of MySpace started towards the end of last year. 

I really like idea that I can enter an update for my profile into AtomKeep and, when I use the “sync”, the data in my other profiles is updated at the same time. As a professional tool this is a good way to keep everything updated and accurate.

There is another thing that is possible. I find filling out profiles for new sites fairly boring and irritating. You know what sort of information you have to fill out: Name & Address, Contact, Education, User Image, Work, Professional Summary, etc.  Atomkeep offers a useful alternative to this because it can fill them out for you. Bonus I say!

Reading about the tool, it warns that, if you do choose the “sync” option, all sites will be changed, therefore if, for example, you have a different photo on different sites, they will all change to the new one, but I don’t think this is a major problem and of course it can be changed back again by you. So I’m going to give AtomKeep a try and  see how it works.