Tools for helping your students choose their topic

By a roundabout route I have come across this useful collection of free web tools from University of Mississippi Library which could be used by us in teaching students how to choose their topic. One of the must cover elements of my teaching (facilitating student learning, sorry!) is use of keywords - defining what it is that is being researched.

The Google Wonder Wheel is one that I should have known about before. Recommend you try this. It's not infallible in the links it makes, but it's easy enough to find and may engage our users - the ones that think visually, that is!

Library of the Future in Plain English

Here is great trigger video to help discussions about the changing library : from University of Technology, Sydney. It's complete with the usual Plain English "boos" when there's some out of date technique mentioned...

Social Media Revolution

If you ever need a quick punchy video to demonstrate the kind of world we live in, then this could be your answer. Particularly good for business and media students.

Netvibes dashboards are great!

Every now and again I come across something online that changes my life! Tweetdeck was the last one that I remember immediately. Now it's Netvibes.
Thanks to Phil Bradley's Weblog I was reminded to take a look at Netvibes again. See his post here. It makes the creation of a collection of RSS feeds so easy! Just put in your subject and it creates a page of feeds and you can then add your own selected ones! Brilliant!This will be really useful for setting up pages of resource feeds on subjects for staff and students.
I've always used PageFlakes for my home page : guess I should change to Netvibes.

LRC induction using iPod Touch and quizzes

Ashton Sixth Form College made this little video of their LRC induction with a group of sixth formers. Instead of the usual tour or talk, they used iPod Touch with quizzes.

It can be viewed via this link.