A List of Some of The Best Books of The Year 2011

Goodreads has finally published the list of the Winners of Goodreads Choice Awards. The selection covers different categories from fiction to paranormal fantasy. I have included here a snapshot of these categories together with the favourite book selected for each one.
Goodreads, in case you are not familiar with this website, is one of the largest site for readers and book recommendations in the world. It has a library of more than 220.000.000 books and over  6.600.000 members. Its mission is to help people improve the process of their reading  and learning . According to Goodreads :

"Most book recommendation websites work by listing random people’s reviews. On Goodreads, when a person adds a book to the site, all their friends can see what they thought of it. It’s common sense. People are more likely to get excited about a book their friend recommends than a suggestion from a stranger. We even created an amazing algorithm that looks at your books and ratings, and helps you find other books based on what fellow Goodreads members with similar tastes enjoyed. Ultimately, it’s all based on our foundation of true-blue readers. Our members also create trivia about books, lists of the best books, post their own writing and form groups and book clubs."

Here is the list of Winners of 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards

Head over to Goodreads Choice Awards page to explore more.

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6 Free Tools to Convert Youtube Videos to MP3

Now that mobile devices are ubiquitous, some people still find it hard to download their favourite music or audio files. This is due to the fact that  most of the portable devices do not support some of the video formats available online now. As a solution , here is a list of some of the best free tools you can use to convert Youtube videos into MP3. You might ask me why Youtube and not other video platforms. The answer is quite obvious, Youtube is number 1 video resource for internet users according to the latest statistics in this field. I also opted for Youtube because most of educators use it as a resource and it would be great if they can now convert some of its content to MP3 to embed in their mobile devices for sharing with their colleagues or students.

Image Credit :qweas.com

This list is not conclusive and I might have unkowingly skipped some tools. But the ones mentioned below are among the best ones online and are completely free.

1- Xenra

2-Video2mp3

3- Free Youtube to Mp3 Converter

4- X2X Free Youtube to MP3 Converter

5-Mobile Media Converter

This is a tool I have covered in a single post entitled Mobile Mdia Converter : Easily Convert Youtube Videos to Mp3.

6- Listen to Youtube

This is also a web tool that I have written about in an earlier article entitled ListentoYoube: Convert Videos into Audio Formats.

If you any suggestions or additions feel free to add them below.

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InserText Inser Preselected Text with just One Click

Today I am going to talk about a very important tool  called InsertText. This is a Chrome extension that allows users to save blocks of texts to paste them wherever they want. I found this extension very useful for I used to retype the same information almost  everyday when I am accessing certain websites. For instance you would always type your email address each time you want to register in an website or the like. You would also look for your email signature to annex it to a certain posting, these actions can now be done easily and with just one click. All you need to do if you are working on Chrome browser ,which I would advise you to use because of the several advantages it has over other browsers, is to install InsertText add-on and whenever you want to insert a chunk of saved text simply right click where you want to insert it, open the InsertText menu and  select the text to insert. Yes it is that easy.

Some features of InsertText

Here is a list of some of the best features that InsertText offers to its users:

• It is free
• It is easy to use
• It lets you create several blocks of text and save them for later use
• It allows you to paste the saved text with one click
• You can use either plain text or rich text format
• It lets you create multiple folders to organize different types of text

To installt InsertText you need to head over to Chrome Extension Store and click on download button.

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A List of some of The best Seacrh Engines for Social Networks

Social networks are playing a major role in today's virtual world. They not only connect people of the same perspective but also provide a bottomless repository of useful web and media links.Think about how many times you this year have shared a link to an important article or a video explaining an important phenomenon . You might go Oh My I can not remember. Yes neither do I . The amount of information shared on Social media  is just as important as the one shared on regular search engines. This is exactly why These social websites constitute a major component of the search results you would get using a search engine like Google or Yahoo.

As a matter of fact, more than 60 percent of the links displayed in a  search result page would  lead to social media websites. With this powerful presence of social media in search engines , a new technology has recently sprouted around the use of social networks as a source of information. There are now several Social Network search engines that provide results from the popular social websites. If you have a quest and you want to search it just in social networks then you can use The list of social engines compiled here. You might be surprised to find results coming from a link shared by one of your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. These social search engines have the ability to filter all the unnecessary search results and provide you with just the ones you want. Using these tools, users will be also be able to garner the results they need without having to search each social network individually.
The following list is not conclusive and I might have unknowingly skipped some tools but the ones mentioned below  are among the best social network search engines online.

1- Social Mention

Socialmention is a social media search and analysis platforms that gathers user generated content from across the social spectrum into a single stream of information. It allows users to :
Esily track and measure what people are saying about a topic or even you
It provides a point in time media search and analysis service
It lets you search blogs, microblogs,bookmarks, networks, videos, images,comments, events . 
It lets you create search alerts and keep track of your topics in social media.


2- Google Social Search

Google Social Search is a great social search engine that I have covered in a single post entitled Google Social Search: Socialized Search Results.

Image Credit: makeuseof.com

3-Social Search

Social Search  is a great search engine that searches links shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook.


Social-Search.com Intro from social-search on Vimeo.



4- Samepoint

Samepoint  is also a powerful search result. It is geared more towards following the conversations around a particular subject. The results of a search conducted on Samepoint feature a stream of content that provides snippets of conversations together with the icon of the social website the converstaion is taking place on.

Watch this video to learn more





5- Folowen

Folowen is a social media search engine that aggregates information about people and organizations from several social media sites into one single page.Folowen will enable you to follow in a person or organization`s social profile be it in Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Myspace, Linkedin, and many others.





6-yoname

Yoname is a people search engine. It allows users to find people using social media such as Webshots, Digg, Dailymotion, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Myspace, Linkedin to mention but some. You search using one of the following ways: first and last name, username, phone number,or email address .






7-Snitch.name

Snitch.name is a cool social search engine. It is commonly known as the social white pages. It offers a simpler way of searching in that it divides sites into categories such as Social ( Facebook, Twitter, Bebo.etc), Professional ( Linkedin), Academic ( Google Scholar,MIT, ect) blogs ( Wordpress), General ( yoname, Google ).

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DifferenceBetween Find out Differences for Seemingly Similar Terms

What is the difference between ROM and RAM ?  is flu different from cold ? is Pilate the same as Yoga? The common thing between all these question is the fact that they inquire about the differences between seemingly similar terms. To provide answers to these questions will entail you some effort and time looking around online for useful websites to gratify your quests. But with DifferenceBetween you can anwser all these questions with a single click.

DifferenceBetween is a coll website that is free to use. It provides differences between two seemingly similar  terms. You can browse through the site`s articles or use the search bar to look for specific articles. There are several categories to help you focus your search. Here are some examples of categories and their articles :

Health
In this category you can find articles detailing difference between similar health terms such as :

Difference between scratch and itch
difference between  Mosquito and spider bites

Language

difference between Deacons and Elders
Difference between Mystery and Suspense

Internet

Difference between HTML and WML
Difference between Mozilla and Firefox

Business

Difference between Social Networking and Professional Networking
Difference between Government and Business

Nature

Difference between Thunderstorm Watch and Warning
Difference between Ice and Snow

These are just some examples. There are also categories like technology, science, objects, most emailed articles, top viewed articles. I believe this website is a great treasure for educators. You can use it to look for information to include in your lessons . It would also be great if you share DifferenceBetween with your students and show them how they can use it.
I have personally subscribed to their newsletter service to keep track of the new articles published. To discover and hopefully use this website you can head over to DifferenceBetween official page.

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A List of some of The Best Web Archiving Tools

How many times you lost all your online opened tabs because of power outage and get so mad and furious. It did happen to me quite often and sometimes I would end up putting my laptop aside and leave everything for another time. One of the most important things we have learnt from this technology thing is the necessity to always make back up plans for everything you are doing online. I personally am writing this post now and having 53 tabs opened in three separate windows, but I already learnt the lesson and I do have several emergency plans to save my tabs and get back to them whenever I want.

Image credit : cannongroupcom

In fact, browsers are developing so fast that they are way different from what they used to be a couple of years ago. Many, if not all of them, offer free add-ons and extensions to help you save your tabs and web pages for a later use. You might be already aware of some of them but in case you forget them or need  to explore other options then here is a list I have compiled featuring some of the most useful applications  for web page archiving. With these tools you can save the entire web page you are working on and and access back whenever your time allows for it.

Before I start the list I want to remind you ,in case you forget, about the basic and `` primitive` techniques used use with the three most known browsers to save web pages.

As for Firefox

• click on menu then select file
• and click on ` save page as` or click on Ctrl+ S             

 As for Chrome

There is a page icon next to the address bar. Click on it to save your page or just do a right hand click anywhere in the page and select save as.

As for Internet Explorer

IE has also the save option thing just like the previous browsers. There is only one exception in that the drop down menu that opens up for you when you are to save a web page has different options for you to choose from as the picture shows.

Now here is the list of the web archiving applications :



1-Sitesucker






 Sitesucker is a  tool for cloning entire web pages on Mac. This free tool   provided by the Mac App store is designed to let its users scan and download whole websites including copies of images , background video files and more.







2-Readit later

I have already talked about this tool before in Readit Later Save Web Pages Instantly. This is mainly a web plug-in that you can install on your browser. It is one of my favourite tools because it is easy to use and with one click you will have your page saved for a later reading. Check out my my previously mentioned article to learn more.



3- PDF Download

This is another awesome tool for saving webpages but this time in PDF format. It actually converst any unsecured web page into a high quality PDF. It is an add-on that works on most of the browsers like  Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Flock, Internet Explorer, and Fire Fox





4- Instapaper

The famous Instapaper website offers its users a Read it Later bookmarklet . You need to have an account with them so that each time you do not have time to read a web page you just click on the bookmarklet and there it is saved in your account . It is a great tool and I do recommend it for you.






5- LaterLop

LaterLop is just like Instapaper in that it offers you a bookmarklet to save your web pages for a later use. The  only thing it does offer other than the bookmarklet tool is the add-on for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Installing this add-on will enable you to do the same work the bookmarklet does.



6- Taboo

If you are like me and have the habit to work on several tabs at once in your browser then I would advise you to cosider Taboo which is a Firefox add on . Taboo takes screenshots of the pages you have opened and organize them in a grid like display. You can also view your saved links in a calendar format. The other interesting thing it does is  that it remembers “session state information such as how far you’ve scrolled on the page and information in forms,” etc.




 7- toread

toread is an email-based free bookmarking service. All you need to do is install the bookmarklet on your browser and whenever you want to save a web page just click on it and a cached version of the site will instantly be sent to your email. It also works on mobile phones and can send you just the text version of any website you want.

I hope you learnt new things from this list and if you have any further suggestions or additions feel free to drop them below

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A List of Some of The Best Free Screencasting Tools to Record your Screen and Make Awesome Tutorials

Have you ever wondered how video tutorials are made ? You might be wrong and think it needs advanced technology knowledge to do them. It is in fact way easier than you have ever thought. The tools below will enable you to make your screencast and broadcast it to the world to see it. Screencasting is all about sharing your screen with others, not in real time ,of course, but in a short or long recorded videos.

Educators will find these tools very useful , for they can now create their own `how to` videos and share them with their colleagues and students. As I said earlier, the procedure is very simple and , in most of the time , all it takes is a moderetally high internet broadband and a registration. You will need to open accounts in some of  these websites so that you can store the tutorials you make and share them using links. The registration is free and takes only a couple of minutes.
Since this blog targets educators then these tools are for educational purposes but others in different sectors can also use them if what they do entails a screencast.
Ok here is the list:

1- Screencast-O-Matic

Screencast-O-Matic is my favourite screencasting tool of them all. It is free and easy to use . With one click you can start recording your screen and right from your browser on Windows, Mac, Linux and does not require any software installation. it is all online.

Watch this video to learn more





2- CamStudio

Camstudio is also a great screencasting tool. It allows its users to screen record and  ceate awesome video tutorials and share them through a generated link with others online. It is also easy to use and the only thing you need to do is download it for free into your computer.






Watch this video to learn more about Camstudio:





3- Copernicus

This is another free recording software that works with Mac. It enables its users to :

• Take screenshots and save them
• Record video and save it directly to RAM
• Use the movie feature to create how to movies
• It is free and weights 4.9 MB

4-Jing

Jing allows its users to create images and videos of what they see on their screen and share them with the world instantly and easily. Just to let you know that Jing has two versions one is free and the other is premium. So the free Jing offers just : five minutes of screen recording and some mark up tools for images but the pro version offers way more. However, educators might make do just with the free Jingle.


5- Wink

Wink is a tutorial and presentation creation software that lets its users :
 Capture screenshots, add explanations, boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
Record voice while making a tutorial
It is free and easy to use
It requires a download
It is compatible with several operating systems , you just need to choose you OS when trying to download it



The above five tools are the main FREE screencasting  tools available online. As I said before, educators can contend themselves with just one of them especially Screencast-O-Matic but if it happens that you want more developed screen recording tools and sotwares then here are some names that you can keep in mind when trying to purchase one:

1.  Adobe Captivate ( costs $700   )
2.  AllCapture ( costs between €169 and €249  )
3. Hypercam ( costs $39.95 )
4. iShowU ( costs $20 USD )
5. ScreenRecord ( costs $ 19.95)

All thanks and gratitude go to Sean P Aune who has labored and  gathered this list of screencasting tools .

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