IT 5130: Week 11 Tools

USTREAM.TV
http://www.ustream.tv

Looking for your 15 minutes of fame? Now’s your chance! Ustream.TV lets you create an interactive video broadcast that goes out live to your audience. The interactive part comes in by letting the viewers personally interact with the broadcaster, or with other viewers. All you need is a camera, a microphone and an internet connection and you can broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.

I can see where this might be a good tool to use for education. It might have actually been helpful for the Trend Analysis project in IT 5650, if you didn’t have an aversion to appearing on-screen and could get the students to participate all at the same time. That, of course, is like herding cats...

I like the original idea for this tool…a way to let service members overseas connect with many family members at the same time. Of course, now entertainers, musicians and even politicians have jumped on the bandwagon.


Bubbl.us
http://bubbl.us

Bubbl.us ia a free mind mapping software program that lets you collaborate with others online. You can also embed your mind map into your blog or website, email or print your mind map or save the mind map as an image.

When using the mind map, each bubble of information connects to its preceding parent bubble and is appropriately color coordinated for hierarchy sake.

Bubbl.us also has a cool delete confirmation gimmick. Once you press the “X” in the corner of a bubble you want to delete, a countdown starts from three as the line connecting the bubble to its parent bubble acts as a lit fuse. When it reaches zero the bubble blows up in a cloud of fire. Cool!


esnips
http://www.esnips.com/

eSnips is a social content-sharing site. You can upload pictures, videos, music, documents and your favorite links. It also comes with five gigabytes of storage for free.

You can create a variety of different folders to put your stuff in, and then based on the privacy settings you control, you decide who gets to see what.

eSnips also has communities where like-minded people can share their common interests. Those interests are expressed by tags used to describe content in the community.