Scott McLeod recently shared 13 tools he couldn’t live without. Here are 12 of mine and 2 honorable mentions.

iPhone – I know there was a world before the iPhone, but I prefer not to think about it. Increasingly, I use it more and more around the house in lieu of my laptop if all I’m doing is Tweeting or reading my RSS feeds.

My iPhone

Google Docs – Almost everything I write at least begins life as a Google Doc. Sure, it may end up in Scrivener or Pages for fine-tuning or formatting when it’s ready to be published, but for just getting something down “on paper” it’s tough to beat GDocs.

Gmail – Other than my work email (FirstClass. Blech.), all of my various email accounts are managed in a single Gmail account. I’ve been a Gmailer since it debuted (2004?) and can’t imagine not having it.

Fever – My RSS reader of choice. We all have “top-tier” feeds that we never want to miss and “lower-level” feeds that we read if time allows. Plus, how guilty do you feel when you have “713 unread” in your Google Reader? Fever is a single-user web app that you run on your own server. Basically your top feeds or daily reads are “kindling” and your secondary feeds are “sparks.” The sparks are kept out of the main view and there’s no nagging “unread feeds” indicator so you can ignore them guilt-free.

My Fever homepage / 92 feeds and zero clutter

Why have sparks at all, then? Here’s where Fever gets interesting… There is some magic algorithm that monitors all your feeds for common topics or links and then gives you a “temperature reading” of the hottest topics and links in all of your feeds. So – for once – it is actually BETTER to subscribe to more feeds as they’ll provide the sparks. Then for daily reading you just cruise through your kindling. There is also a web-based iPhone version (no native app) that looks as good as the full browser-based version. Geek Note: As mentioned above, you have to run Fever on your own server or hosted web space. There is some setup involved, but it took me less than 15 minutes. After that I was able to import my OPML from Google Reader and I’ve done zero maintenance since.

TweetDeck/Tweetie 2 – As I’ve mentioned before, Tweetie for the iPhone and TweetDeck for the desktop.

iTunes – I’m a music fanatic. I have music on constantly when I’m at my desk.

Adium/iChat – Indispensable. I wish more of my colleagues were on AIM or GTalk. I use Adium mostly because it keeps my contacts all in one list. iChat, on the other hand, supports video chatting.

Quicksilver – “Act without doing.” When I sit down at a Mac without QS, I am immediately lost.

Firefox – It’s a little pokey lately, but my plug-ins don’t work in Safari.

Skitch – This was an easy one to almost forget, but I use it at least 2 or 3 times a week. Someone wants to know what settings to use in Adium or where a certain preference is located in our district email client. Instead of writing, “Open Preferences. Click the ‘Accounts’ tab. Find the box for SSL and check it. Then enter ‘443′ in the ‘ports’ field…” it’s easier to just pull up my settings and use Skitch to make a screen capture.

Dropbox – Provides access to your stuff from multiple computers as well as the peace of mind to know that your stuff is backed up in the cloud should your hard drive take a dirt nap.

ActionMethod – The best task and project manager I’ve used in a long time. Complete with an iPhone app. After trying many, many other apps this is the only one that works like I think. Plus, there are nifty paper products to complement your online setup.

Honorable Mention:

Evernote – The place to dump everything that has other place to go. Scans of receipts, software licenses, anything.

Caffeine – Not an “every day” application, but it’s nice to have when you need it. Click on the coffee cup in your task bar and it fills up. Now your display won’t go to sleep. Ever. Very useful if you’re presenting. Saves you the embarrassment of being in the middle of a presentation when your display goes to sleep or your screen saver comes on.

I think some of us — for fear of being perceived as fundamentalist technology apologists — feel the need to qualify statements about particular hardware or software with the phrase, “It’s not about the technology…”

I should know. I’m one of them.

It’s about the learning, certainly. And the technology that supports that learning. But if the goal is to create a collaborative, networked space for learning then technology and the Internet are necessary catalysts.

I’ve become increasingly reliant on certain online tools to get things done at and away from my desk. From my task list in Remember the Milk to our Web-enabled classroom walk-through instrument to the Google Docs I use to collaborate with colleagues, sometimes the best solution requires Web access.

I, for one, am spoiled. I’m so used to ubiquitous access to the web whenever and wherever I need it that I take for granted that it will always just be there. I’m stopping short of an of existential crisis here; I’m not “re-evaluating” my choice of tools. I like my tools and they work for me 99.9% of the time.

I’m just pointing out how amazing it is that in a relatively short time we’ve come to a place where, when the technology doesn’t work as intended, we’re paralyzed.

I know. I’m hilarious. But it’s a good question, right? We wouldn’t think of keeping campus open if the indoor plumbing suddenly stopped working, would we?

Argue all you want that we shouldn’t be so dependent on tools that live “in the cloud,” but having access to them has become de rigueur in my world.

This begs the question (for me, at least…) of how this little temporary outage affected our students. Was it business as usual, or were classes interrupted by the inability to access resources? This certainly isn’t a value judgment — there are fantastic traditional lessons and really horrendous online ones — more of a general wondering. If technology tools have become as embedded as we’d like them to be, I would hope this would be evidenced by at least some disruption in the day’s activities.

If class had been temporarily shut down due to lack of online resources, think of the amazing teachable moment. What better opportunity to make sure students have the interpersonal, social tools they need to collaborate with people who happen to be in the same room.

Ben Wildboer shows how he used some ideas he found online (including some from yours truly!) to upgrade a slide deck about basic Earth structure. His blog post includes an “Extreme Makeover” like before and after look at his entire slide deck.

Ben’s immediate observation distills everything I’ve been trying to convey as succinctly as I’ve seen it done:

There were several students that expressed regret at the demise of the bullet points. It’s easier for them to just copy down exactly what it says (of course it is, they don’t have to actually pay attention or comprehend to do that). How well they’ve been trained by their past experiences!

Ah yes. Undoing years of damage done by the ubiquitous bullet point. Challenging, to say the least. But definitely a battle worth fighting.

Go check out Ben’s slide decks. And the rest of his blog while you’re there. He’s off to a great start!!

If you haven’t seen this (and what Apple computer lover hasn’t?), you need to check it out. If you’re in the same age demographic as I am, you may remember typing many a middle school paper using AppleWorks on a machine exactly like this (attached to a very noisy Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer, of course!).

Dan Budiac scored himself a new Apple //c. And not just any Apple //c — this one has been sitting in its original packaging since it was manufactured in 1988. And he’s got a very retro-cool set of “unboxing” photos from before unboxing was something most people even cared about.

Gosh – just looking at these pictures makes me all warm inside. From teaching myself how to program in BASIC to learning Logo in my 5th grade class and playing the green-screen version of Oregon Trail, this was my first computer experience.

I can’t wait to hear what happens when he sends in the warranty registration card…

[via an interview with Dan on MacBreak Weekly 76]

I received an email from Brian, a middle school social studies teacher in Boston, who expressed an interest in presenting to his faculty about improving his presentation skills. He wrote:

The creative juices that flow as I try and design better slides has not only provided a nice outlet for me in the weeks before Christmas break…but also helped me get more creative in connections I make to the material.

That’s what it’s all about! If you enjoy creating your slides (I do!), you’ll enjoy presenting them. And if you enjoy presenting them rather than making them just a bunch of notes that you have to “get through,” your audience will enjoy your delivery a whole lot more.

My enthusiasm for your presentation, which I shared with a number of members of my staff, has made me into the resident presentation guru in my building.

Nice. I’m glad to have had this kind of impact!

My principal has asked me to do a presentation on presenting at our upcoming PD and I wondered if you had some advice on how to attack it. My audience would be a frightening mix of the computer savvy and folks who refer to “The Google.” What would you recommend in terms of content? I could see the scope being very broad and touching on why design better slides, how to do it, where to find good images, etc. Or staying narrow and looking at the how part.

First off, I love The Google!

Second, and this is just my two cents, if you’re thinking of presenting on presenting to your staff, you need to provide the context. If that’s how we should be teaching kids, it’s surely how we should be teaching adults.

I didn’t look at my presentation to staff as a “How-To” with respect to PowerPoint (although that’s what some of them came to the session expecting…), I planned it as a “Why-Bother” with the intent of raising the level of awareness of what we’re putting on the screen. If it gave at least one teacher pause before they projected the same, tired slide show for yet another year, I felt my presentation would be worthwhile.

See, the “Why-Bother” actually motivated the “How-To” with about a half-dozen of my attendees. It put it into context for them. Rather than telling them how to do something, I shared with them first why they should care.

And it worked! They stayed after my presentation wanting to know more. “OK – I like how you did that. Now show me how to make my slides look like that.” They’re hooked.

A “How-To” without context may be everything that’s wrong with the way we present professional development to teachers, but that’s for me to tackle down the road. You know – that and this whole “global warming” thing.