Archive for August 2010

Amy Porterfield at the Social Media Examiner rounds up the 10 Top Facebook Pages and Why They’re Successful. Organizations who are striving for a successful social media presence will find this analytical post inspirational.

Google has announced a new feature called Priority Inbox for Gmail users.

“Priority Inbox is an algorithmic solution to email overload. Gmail attempts to automatically process your email by factoring in variable such as who the email was sent by, how many people it was sent to and the keywords included in the subject and body of the message.”

And Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable has already put together 5 Tips for Better Productivity with Gmail Priority Inbox.

Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker come up with the Top 10 External Hard Drive Tricks. The article gives quick suggestions with links to tutorials for acheiving all of these great tricks. I’m particularly interested in learning how to back up and play my Wii Games from an external hard drive, but many others look good as well. Here are the top 5 you’ll find in the article:

1. Run XBMC From a USB Drive
2. Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive
3. Back up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Drive
4. Use The External Drive’s Controller to Connect Other Peripherals via USB
5. Swap the External Drive with Your Computer’s Drive

Nancy Messieh at MakeUseOf rounds up 10+ Resources For Free Professional WordPress Themes. I have used Woo Themes myself and have found their themes easy to use and excellent for displaying portfolios of work as well as traditional blogs. I can’t wait to check out the rest of these list entries.

Phong Thai Cao at Six Revisions gathers up 10 Free Website Chat Widgets to Make Your Site Interactive. Many of these look good, and the post discusses the advantages to each in addition to a screenshot.

Yogesh Mankani at SaveDelete rounds up 18 Amazing Alternative Web Browsers You Should Try. This brief article reviews each list entry, noting specific features which may make it a better choice for browsing, web development, social networking, viewing in 3D, and more. If you’re ready to try a browser besides Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Internet Explorer or Opera, you won’t want to miss this post.

Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker presents 10 helpful tweaks for Facebook in the Top 10 Facebook Fixes. Each of these quick-fix suggestions includes a screenshot and explanation of how to improve your Facebook experience. Here are his top 5 tweaks:

1. Stop Your Friends from Revealing Your Location
2. Strip Out Annoying Facebook “Games,” Quizzes, and Other Cruft
3. “Quit” Facebook While Still Staying in Touch
4. Get Back the Basic Privacy You Signed Up For
5. Find Out When Anyone Else Logs into Your Account

Ekaterina Walter at the Social Media Examiner posts about 9 Ways to Sell Social Media to the Boss. If you need inspiration for making your case for using social media in your organization, you’ll want to check out this post. Here are the top 5 recommendations:

1. Display Current Conversations
2. Don’t Leave Out Competitor’s Information
3. Show Your Industry Peers’ Successes and Failures
4. Use Data
5. Start Small

Stephanie Marcus at Mashable comes up with 10 iPhone Apps to Get You Back to School. Quite a few of these look good, including Blackboard Mobile and myHomework.

Chris Mautner at The Patriot News asks What’s good about texting? This quick and helpful article discusses the educational uses of texting.

“Let’s say you’re doing a lecture and you want to find out if the audience is “getting it.” Programs such as Poll Everywhere will let you pose questions to the audience, who can then text back their responses. Their answers are then calculated live and you can see instantly what percentage of the classroom understands the material. “You get instant feedback,” Palmer says. “In a classroom of students no one wants to raise their hand and say ‘I don’t understand.’ But if they can anonymously text in, you can figure out what percentage of the class is having trouble.””

Via @Gerry McKiernan

Amy-Mae Elliott at Mashable gathers 7 Cool Chrome Extensions for Twitter. Each of these productive tools are available for free, here are the top four apps:

• Twitter Share This Page
• Twitter Extender
• TwitterWatch – Real Time Twitter Update
• Twitter Refresh

Mark Sample at The Chronicle’s ProfHacker blog presents A Framework for Teaching with Twitter. If you’re interested in classrom adoption of microblogging, you’ll want to check out this article.

Catherine-Gail Reinhard, Executive Producer & Director at Videasa, blogs for Mashable about How To: Use Annotations to Promote Your Brand on YouTube. Here are just a few of her tips:

• Link to Videos
• Link to a Playlist
• Subscribe
• Compose Message
• Group
• Collaborative Annotations

Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable writes about 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now. She discusses the significance of each of these influential trends, as well as provides examples:

• Social Scanning
• Q&A and Intelligent Information Discovery
• Group Buying
• Mobile Meets Loyalty
• Checking-In to Entertainment

The folks at Educause have put together a new “7 Things” guide, covering 7 Things You Should Know About Assessing Online Team-Based Learning. As usual, the quick reference source answers the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. How does it work?
3. Who’s doing it?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?