As soon as I started following more than a dozen people on Twitter I realized that I needed more help than the Twitter.com site could offer (at the time).  I saw recommendations for several Twitter desktop clients and after some experimentation, settled on Tweetdeck.  Thank goodness, since my “follow” list just keeps growing.  Tweetdeck helps me manage my Twitter stream (and my own updates from several accounts) with ease.

When Twitter_Tips mentioned this site with 10 very useful videos on how to get more out of Tweetdeck, I learned just how little of the power of Tweetdeck I was using.  These brief, well done tutorials are definitely worth your time if you are a Tweetdeck user.  If you aren’t, and feel that Twitter is overwhelming you, you might want to give Tweetdeck a try.

This screencast by Tom Kulmann explains nicely how to manage multiple email accounts through Gmail.

I had been thinking about setting up another gmail account and was wondering just how to handle more than one.  I knew it could be done, but Tom’s Screenr video arrived in my Twitter account (retweeted by @elearning) at just the right time.  Thanks, Tom!

Howcast Media, Inc. says that “from How to Write a Resume to How to Jump-Start Your Car, Howcast provides the answer to any how-to question.”  They do this by engaging consumers to watch and share free, useful how-to videos and guides produced in-house or by their media partners, trusted brands, and individual contributors.

A friend called my attention to Howcast so I watched a couple of the “how to” videos on their site, including one on how to use Twitter.  I thought they were fairly well done.  The small ads at the bottom of  the videos were a bit annoying but I found tbey could be removed by clicking on “x.”

The video content is distributed across a network of web, mobile, and cable partners, including YouTube, MySpace, Hulu, AOL, Yahoo!, Comcast, Apple, TiVo and Verizon.

“In addition to the Howcast Studios, the Emerging Filmmakers Program offers up-and-coming filmmakers the chance to gain experience, exposure, and extra income by creating short how-to videos.”  The filmmakers program has partnered with film and television programs at Boston University, Flashpoint Academy, and Charles Sturt University to expose students to web video production.

Howcast was named a top web site of 2008 by both TIME and PC Magazine, profiled in the New York Times Sunday Business Section, nominated for two Webby Awards and has had its iPhone app featured in an Apple iPhone commercial.

At OnlineColleges.net you’ll find links to tutorials for those interested in incorporating Twitter into their teaching.

They point out that “using Twitter in education has been all the buzz recently.  If you are ready to start using Twitter yourself and need a little help getting started or have already been using it and can use a little extra help, then these tutorials are just for you.”

The site has links to everything from how to set up a Twitter account to practical ideas for using Twitter in elearning.  It also includes links to video highlights showing how Twitter is being used in promoting education.

In a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning (PDF), online learning was broken down into three types: expository (learners receive information via digital means), active (learners build knowledge by manipulating online tools), interactive (learners build knowledge through collaborative interaction).

Online learning certainly doesn’t mean the end for teachers, Mashable notes.  “Online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied.  The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.”

Appropriate use of the tools at the teacher’s disposal will maximize the learning impact of education for students, separating good teachers from bad ones. “The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.”

Online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning.  We can expect it to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning and where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, or desirable because of convenience.  Teachers will need to continue to adapt and learn to employ future technologies.

I used to do quite a bit of screencasting and was happy to have Camtasia Studio to allow me to do a number of functions.  But these days, I’m only likely to need a simple (and preferably easy) app.

Screenr just launched yesterday.  It is a free app that runs inside your browser (nothing to download!), with the twist that when you are finished recording you can send your video directly to your Twitter followers.  Before you send your screencast to Twitter, you can review your recording and add a description, says ReadWriteWeb.

You don’t have to send your video to Twitter, but for a lot of users, this will be the main reason to use Screenr. “The integration with Twitter also goes one step further, as you can re-tweet a screencast right from within the application and when you leave a comment, you can also choose to send it to Twitter as an @reply to the author.”

You can also embed your video in a blog post, upload it directly to YouTube, or download it to your desktop for more editing.  Check out the Screenr home page for a short video tour and a number of examples of screencasts that users have created.

Screenr has a lot of competition.  We have mentioned Jing here before.  All screencasters have a similar range of features, but with Screenr it is extremely easy to record a video and share it with your Twitter friends.  If you don’t already have a free Twitter account, this is a good time to get with it.

The compiler says that, “From preschool to graduate education, these 100 blogs are a great starting point for educators looking for inspiration and innovation.”

Educators can find answers and valuable teaching resources in these blogs.  Includes General Teaching Blogs, Specialty Subject Blogs, Best Podcasts for Teachers, Best Video Blogs for Teachers.  [via iLibrarian]

Photo by peiqianlong. Creative Commons license.

Top 10 tools for a free online education
These reminders from Lifehacker that the Internet “started out as a place for academics and researchers to trade data  and knowledge,” point to a number of sources for free online learning.

Included are places to teach yourself programming, Ubuntu, a new language,, photography, and of course, recognized college online courses.

Academic Earth — the Hulu for education
One of the free online sites mentioned by Lifehacker (above) is Academic Earth, “a user-friendly platform for educational video that allows anyone to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities,” says TechCrunch.

There are 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton available and browseable by subject, university, or instructor.  The site also features famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.

TechCrunch notes that this “isn’t a radically new idea.”  Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content, but Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures.  You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days if you wish.  At the moment it doesn’t have forums, comments, social networking features, or ads, but all of those features and applications are expected in the future.

I was interested in this “absolutely free” app I saw at WebWorker Daily, called CamStudio .

With it you can record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create “industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).”

According to their website, with CamStudio you can:

• Create demonstration videos for any software program
• Create a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions
• Create video tutorials for school or college class
• Record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
• Create video-based information products you can sell
• Record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them

CamStudio can also add screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the “Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself “picture-in-picture” over your desktop.”

It has its own Lossless Codec that “produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.”

With CamStudio, you have control over the output of your video: you can choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos, or you can have “best quality” ones for burning onto CD/DVD.

I haven’t tried CamStudio yet, but its makers also claim it is easy to use and comes with a comprehensive helpfile.  As a user of TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio, which is definitely not free, I’ll be interested to find out — and hear from any of you — how well this free application actually works.

Three big corporations, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco, are throwing their combined weight into a project which they hope will take learning assessment beyond multiple choice tests, reports the Seattle P-I.

New assessment tools — designed to measure information and communication technologies skills — could potentially ask students to get information from the Web and decide whether that information was trustworthy, or to work collaboratively to solve a problem.

The three-year project will be led by Barry McGaw, director of the Melbourne Research Institute at the University of Melbourne.  McGaw will oversee five working groups, one of which will be led by John Bransford, a professor at the University of Washington.

The project has been endorsed by several major international assessment organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Association of the Evaluation of Educational Achievement who plan to refer to the findings when they create benchmarks.

Anoop Gupta, a Microsoft vice president who oversees the education product group, said Microsoft decided to partner on the project because “it is an important strategic area for us as employers.”  He said that information and communication technologies were an important part of 21st century skill sets in need of being measured.

The idea of measuring these skill sets is not new — librarians have been advocating for and developing tools for the assessment of “information literacy” for years, and the academic world has increasingly recognized the need to teach and assess both information and communication technologies.  It’s good to see some major corporations putting resources into the effort.

Photo by Extra Ketchup.  Creative Commons license.