Here are five of the best ideas and resources that I’ve discovered over the past seven days:

1) Web2Wonders – Sadly, this site is no longer available.

2) 5 second films – This site offers a new movie every weekday… but the films are only five seconds long. Could you use any of the videos in your own classroom? Could your pupils make their own five second films? Here’s an example which could be used to discuss how technology has changed… (shared by Guido)

Click here to view the embedded video.

3) 10 Fab Flickr Groups for Teachers – Danny has written another great blog post on his Whiteboard Blog which gives links to different collections of images on Flickr. Each link has some suggestions showing how each set can be used in the classroom.

4) I Can Statements – Bev Evans has created lots of wonderful free resources on her ‘Communication4All‘ site, including these new sets of ‘I Can…’ statements for Science which children can use as personal targets.

5) Teachmeet – The Teachmeet format for professional development continues to be an amazing source of ideas and inspiration. Even if you can’t attend Teachmeet events in person, you can still take advantage of the wonderful content that is shared. Here is a fantastic video which shows Lara Savory sharing some engaging musical warm-ups which are perfect for teachers who aren’t necessarily confident at teaching music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This post on Leon Cych’s blog has another inspirational Teachmeet video which I really enjoyed watching – highly recommended!

What have you discovered this week?

Here are links to some useful video sites which can help you and your colleagues to learn new ICT skills. Many of the videos also suggest possible ways of using different tools in your classrooms:

Teacher Training Videos – Russell Stannard has created a large collection of videos to help teachers to learn how to use a wide range of software and online resources.

www.teachertrainingvideos.com

Learn it in 5 – This site contains a library of how-to videos, produced by technology teachers, for the purpose of helping teachers and students create classroom strategies for today’s 21st century’s digital classroom. Thanks to Mandy Barrow for sharing this via Twitter.

http://learnitin5.com

ICT Video Help – This site, created by Phil Bagge, offers a wonderful set of videos which cover lots of different software.

www.ictvideohelp.co.uk

Why not share these sites with your colleagues in your next staff meeting?

Timetable Online is a relatively new and free tool which allows schools, colleges and universities to book resources online.

www.timetableonline.com

The site has clear tutorials if you are interested in seeing how it works, and you can request use via their simple form.

Cool Tools for Schools is an amazing directory of online web 2.0 resources that schools can use. The site covers presentation tools, collaborative tools, research tools, video tools and a HUGE range of other resources.

The site is a wiki which allows people to add new suggestions to each of the sections… and there are already lots of great links within each of the areas. This site is well worth exploring.

Thanks to Claire Jones for suggesting this on Twitter!

When I think about it, I spend quite a considerable proportion of my day online… whether that be checking email or RSS feeds on my phone in the morning, using web-based resources in the classroom, or general browsing and other work on my computer at home at other times.

I’m becoming increasing reliant upon web services to help me to organise my life and make things easier and / or quicker. There are lots of tools out there and many of them look very useful. So, it can be difficult to fight ‘Feature Creep‘ and try not to keep adding new online distractions to my daily routine.

However, there are a number of web tools that I use on a daily basis, and which I would find it difficult to now go without. I’ll probably talk about some of these in more detail in future posts, but here’s an outline of my favourites:

Google Reader was probably the first online tool that I began using on a daily basis. I started subscribing to RSS feeds using Vienna. However, I remember coming home from a holiday one day to find hundreds of RSS posts which needed my attention. So, I decided to look for an online option which I could use to check feeds when I was out and about. Google Reader fits my needs perfectly and it has a great mobile interface too. The ‘starring’ option is also useful for scanning through posts and picking out ones to look at in more detail later.

I haven’t used Google Docs much in the classroom yet (see Tom Barrett’s blog for some great info about his work). However, Google Docs has been great for other work, where I may start a document in school, and finish it at home. It’s also great for planning my wedding next year, as I can share files with my fiancee / family / friends and update things wherever I am.

EverNote is my second brain. It lets me store notes and images that I need to remember, or keep for reference, and these are all then synced between different computers. They are also accessible online via the web (and with a fantastic iPhone interface). A very useful service.

I signed up for a delicious account quite a while ago, but I didn’t use it to begin with as I didn’t really see the point. I knew most of the websites that I wanted to visit (or so I thought) and a quick Google search usually helped me to discover more. However, I’m now finding delicious to be an incredibly useful way of finding out about new and useful sites. Having a network of friends who follow each other’s bookmarks is an amazing way to make discoveries. Every teacher should have a delicious account!

Twitter is another one of those things I signed up to without really understanding what the point of it was. I started off by posting the odd update telling people what I was doing, but that was about it. However, after finding new friends and like-minded colleagues, Twitter is now becoming a key part of my work online. Help is often just a quick message away, and it’s a great way for teachers to learn from each other and share ideas.

I’m a bit of a backup addict! I try to make regular backups on external hard drives / DVD etc, but have always worried what might happen if those backups got damaged or lost. So, I signed up for JungleDisk. It’s a piece of software which lets you backup your files online to Amazon’s servers. Another bonus of the service is that they offer a web-access upgrade. This gives me a complete backup of my documents online which I can access via the web from anywhere. This has ‘saved my bacon’ many times when I’ve forgotten to bring a particular flash drive to school. I can just connect to my JungleDisk and download the online backup of the file I wanted!

Although Toodledo is last on this list, it’s definitely the one that I use the most. I’ve always kept lists of things to do, but losing the paper I’d written them on was an occasional problem! Toodledo is an online ‘To Do’ list. It is incredibly flexible and has options for setting start / due dates, repeats, task lengths, folders / contexts and much more. There is also fantastic Twitter integration which allows you to add new tasks via Twitter (and therefore via SMS when you’re away from a computer). I find this really handy… if I think of something that I need to do, I send a text message to Toodledo and then I can forget about it until Toodledo reminds me that it needs to be done. There are currently 181 things on my Toodledo list, so I’d better stop blogging and get on with them!

How about you? Which online tools could you no longer live without?