Merging and Filtering Information Feeds

I've just been having a look at a tool called Grazer which can help you to stream line your RSS subscriptions and filter the results. This can be really helpful if you are looking for information on a specific topic and drawing on a wide range of sources.

Here' an example I created which searches all three of my own blogs and delivers results of postings which include information or resources on video. You can then create a widget like the one below which can be imported into your blog, homepage or social network profile.

Grazer has some free options as well as paid for ones. Basically paid for will give you a lot more storage of what it refers to as reading lists (a collections of feeds) and streams. The streams can be filtered around specific topics and then used to create widgets.

It sounds much more complicated than it is, so it's worth watching some of their video tutorials to find out how easy it is. You can find them in the section called 'Tour'.

You'll have to part worth an email to register and start creating your lists and streams, but they seem to be taking care of people's privacy and information, so that's good.

On the whole this is a pretty handy tool, Shame you have to pay for the premium services, but I guess that's life.

Hope you find it useful.

Related links:

• Creating a personal homepage
• Turn Feeds into a PDF Newsletter
• RSS and Personal Homepages for Teachers
• Teaching Better: Digg for Language Teachers
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Creating a Wiki
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Naming My Sources: Part 2

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Edublog Awards 2008 Nomination

Well wonder of wonders, my Learning Technology Blog has been nominated for an Edublog Award.
It's been nominated within the Best Resource Sharing category, which means there is some VERY stiff competition. To be honest, my money ( and actually my nomination) is on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day/ but it's still nice that someone has seen fit to nominate one of my blogs.

If you haven't already, it's well worth checking out the list of blogs that have been nominated as there's some really excellent ones there, which makes it that much more of an honour to get one of mine in there. You can see all the categories here: Edublog Awards 2008

And you can see my nominations here: My nominations

Hope you find some interesting stuff there.

Related links:

• My learning technology blog
• My nominations
• Naming My Sources: Part 2
• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Creating a personal homepage

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Turn Feeds into a PDF Newsletter

I've just found this quick and easy tool for converting a blog or website feed (or feeds) into a simple PDF newsletter. This is ideal if you want to share information with your non-techy colleagues or grab texts for use with students.
All you do is go to the Tabbloid website, click on 'Get Started', paste in the feed address and click on generate. The newsletter is created in 'tabloid' style and you can either email it to yourself or colleagues or just save it to your computer (in which case you don't even need to add an email address).

It's very simple, but also quite limited in that hyperlinks and images are lost and there's no customisation (would be nice to add your own title or headline), but it does enable you to combine any number of feeds into one simple document, so if you wanted to share and print content from a number of blogs to share around then this could be ideal. Here's an example that I created using the feed from my Daily English Activities blog

• Daily English Activities Newsletter.

Hope you find this useful.

Related links:

• 1 Minute Listening Activity
• Creating a personal homepage
• Free Web Publishing Community
• Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

RSS and Personal Homepages for Teachers

I've finally found the time to edit and upload a video presentation I created for a training course here in Morocco. The focus of the presentation is on how setting up personal homepages and using RSS feeds can save teachers time and keep them better informed.



The catalyst for finally getting this done, is a discussion that is taking place between the Learning With Computers group (EFL teachers mainly based in South America, but increasingly becoming more international). If you want to be involved in this discussion you can sign up to join the group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learningwithcomputers/
You can also follow the discussion on their blog at: Learning with Computers

You can watch the video presentation from my YouTube channel, above, or if you would prefer a higher quality version, click this link Personal Homepages and RSS.

If you are interested in creating your own personal homepage or doing training to help other teachers create homapages, you can find the tasks and instructions that I refer to here: Creating a personal homepage

Hope you find this useful and that you join the discussion.

Related links:

• Naming My Sources: Part 1
• Naming My Sources: Part 2
• Create your own social network 7 steps
• Creating a Wiki
• Using wikis with EFL students
• Using wikis for teacher development

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Up and Coming blogs

I'm rather pleased that my Learning technology blog (number 41) has been recognised as one of the 50 up and coming must read blogs, by Teaching Tips.com.


Their top 50 have been sorted and catagorised with some brief description about why each one makes the grade and why you should read it.

• 50 must read up and coming blogs

There's some interesting stuff there and it's well worth a look. So have a search through and add the best feeds to your reader or personal homepage . If you don't have a feed reader or homepage, then have a look at my article on how to create one using Netvibes, as it does save you a lot of time.

Teaching tips.com have also put together a list of 100+ resources for teaching without course books and that's well worth checking out too.

Hope you find something useful there.

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..