Dimitris Tzouris

tl;dr The following post is about organizing your bookmarks, annotations, PDFs and notes with Diigo Outliners as well as easily creating citations with Cite This For Me . Diigo Outliners How do you do research? Having ebooks and online journal databases at your disposal is a big help and means less trips to the library, right? But keeping everything organized in one place is very important and can become a helpful guide for your research. Plus, it gives you peace of mind. Diigo was the first tool featured in this column , back in early 2014. Since then, the Diigo team has introduced a new feature: Outliners . Outliners help you organize bookmarked websites, uploaded PDFs as well as your own thoughts and comments, all on one page. Here’s an outliner example for a lesson plan from the Diigo website: With the Diigo extension for Chrome or Firefox , you can bookmark any page on the web. You can also highlight parts of the text and add not...

The following report of Andrew Wright's storytelling workshop was originally written for the 22nd TESOL Macedonia Thrace Northern Greece Annual International convention and has been cross-posted on their blog . Andrew Wright wasn’t wearing his storytelling coat on that Saturday morning, but he was definitely in storytelling mood. His workshop included tips on effective storytelling in our classrooms and of course, he read a few stories too. But, why do we tell stories? Andrew Wright believes that stories give motivation, they allow students to experience English instead of just study it, allow for bonding, support the four basic skills, help presenting and re-recycling and springboarding. What are stories? Stories can be real (facts, history, our life) or fiction (oral or written). They are life’s daily stage of events and we are the actors and how we talk, walk and behave is part of the story as well. How to tell stories? Be clear: Tell your story in such a...

I live in Greece.  Times are hard here. Banks remain shut since last Monday and capital controls have been imposed since then and will not be lifted for some time, according to the latest news. Among other things, this means that all transactions with foreign banks are blocked. Most of my domains are registered with Namecheap and Hover and I have to renew some of them this month. It's really important to do this. Also, this might sound less important, but my Spotify and Google Play Music subscriptions will stop renewing next month. In general, I am unable to use PayPal, Google Wallet, have any transaction with online retailers abroad, such as Apple, Amazon/Audible, Google or support crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Stuff I used to do on a weekly basis. I hadn't though of adding a donate button on this blog before. I've never had ads and I've ignored emails asking me to monetize this blog in the past. But now I need your help. I've ad...

Previously on When EdTech Meets ELT: I wrote about how to curate your own collection or articles using Flipboard, resulting in a beautiful digital magazine. In this "episode," I’ll write about how to discover content and follow blogs and websites in order to create your own daily information stream. This is going to become your own, personalized information diet. I was planning to write about Feedly alone, but on February 10, 2015, Flipboard launched its new web service and it’s definitely worth mentioning. Feedly is probably the most popular online news reader and where the majority of the Google Reader users fled to, after Google shut it down in February 2013. Feedly allows you to subscribe to blogs and websites that provide an RSS feed. This practically means more time for you since you get every new article and blog post in one place - your Feedly page -  without having to check each blog or website individually for new content. To begin, you only...

It's time for the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival!  My favourite time of the year! If you are going, make sure you get the official festival app installed. It is available on iOS and Android. It will help you keep track of your schedule, as well as rate films, see what's trending and what's being discussed on Twitter using the #TDF17 hashtag. But you will also need another app. Many times, you need to turn on your phone to see the time, especially if you are thinking of going to another screening immediately after the one you're in. Sometimes you are looking for an alternative so you can escape. It's okay. It's a film festival. You're supposed to leave in the middle of the screening and go to a different one instead. Every time your phone screen is on, a stream of bad karma is emitted in the room along with the light from your screen and you become an annoyance. That's why you need Night Mode. Available for Android, Night Mo...

There is a lot of content out there. I’m sure you agree. The web is full of websites, blogs, journals and other platforms that (try to) provide you with online content. I’ve already wrote about how you can organize all the information you care about and want to remember. This time I’ll tell you how to make an extra step by creating your own online magazine, in order to serve your own content (e.g. blog posts) or articles you read elsewhere and find really interesting and worth sharing. It is also an easy way for you and your students to become content curators by collecting articles and blog posts that help them understand and learn. A great service for that is Flipboard . Flipboard is the most popular content curation and discovery platform today. It is mainly used on smartphones or tablets, but it also provides a nice web view of online magazines, created either by media outlets or individual users - people with interests. Just like you. In the latest version (f...

One of the most important developments in computer science that has already started to affect our lives is cloud computing. In a nutshell, it means that when you use a computer, you only need a browser and an Internet connection, without having to install any programs or having to upgrade your computer in order to make it faster and powerful enough to run the programs you are using. You simply open a window that connects you to the web and use applications (web apps) that utilize computing power and storage available on some server far, far away. Where exactly? You don’t care. All you care about is your work. Maybe not a TPS report , but definitely that grammar exercise you have to prepare for tomorrow and all the homework you have go through. The article you are reviewing or the final draft of that proposal that was due last night. Up until recently, you could use Google Drive to create Docs, Sheets and Slides (Google’s version of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powe...

Many people use Dropbox to store their documents online. In the cloud as we say. Dropbox is nice. The ones who use it probably know that storing documents in Dropbox basically means: Security and no more worrying about backing up files Easier sharing with family, colleagues and students Access from anywhere, with files syncing across multiple computers, tablets and phones Now you can add a fourth reason: To receive files from others, even those who don’t have a Dropbox account. For example, ask your students to submit their assignments or ask conference speakers to submit their presentations. All you need is DROPitTOme , a Dropbox extension that allows you to receive files from others. You can receive as many files you want, but each file has to be up to 75 MB in size and, of course, each file will use your Dropbox storage space. DROPitToME is free. To get started, go to dropitto.me and register. You will be asked to log in with your Dropbox credenti...

The web is full of resources that can be really useful for teachers and learners. Lots of websites and tools that we can go to in order to enhance our teaching and learning experience. And most of them are free. In this issue, we’ll take a look at two very useful web tools for in-depth analysis of language: Google definitions and Voyant Tools. The latest update of Google definitions comes with a really useful set of information. Make sure you use google.com and simply enter “define” and then the term you are interested in. Apart from the standard dictionary set of results (including terminology, pronunciation with voice, translation) you get some really useful information on the origin on the word that includes a nice diagram. Below that, you get a really useful chart of the mentions of the word in all books scanned by Google that dates back to the 1800s! This can come in handy when you are doing research or when you are trying to explain the origins of a word or how its u...