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.

Michael Wesch blogged recently about “How to get students to read 94 articles before the next class.”

Essentially, each student in his class had to find, read, and summarize five articles before the next class. The summaries were consolidated using Zoho Creator, and, well, according to Wesch:

By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles.  This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation.

I hear the term “leverage” used quite a bit – mostly as a fancy (read: incorrect) synonym for the word “use” (E.g. “Students leveraged their cell phones to call GCast…” or “The principal leveraged technology to show a PowerPoint presentation…”). As a former physics teacher, the word “leverage” has a specific meaning in my mind. It implies compounding resources to gain some mathematical or mechanical advantage.

Leverage is like mechanical gestalt. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You know – like having 15 students collectively read 94 articles before the next class.

Such a simple idea with so much potential for use in the classroom and in professional development.

(Don’t even get me started on the use of the word “potential.”)

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.

Not necessarily educationally related, but I loves me some stats! Now you can see all the statistics on your Flickr photos if you activate your “Flickr stats.”

[via Around the Corner]

The cause, of course, being to rise to the challenge of bringing students engaging, top-quality instruction.

I’m truly humbled by all of the positive attention my “Presentation on Presentations” has received since I published it one week ago. I’m especially grateful to those who have linked it on their own blogs and increased the potential reach for this work.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating that there is nothing in that presentation that I didn’t learn from following in the footsteps of those who have covered this stuff in far greater detail (Dan, Merlin, Guy, Seth, Garr…). I have merely synthesized from the work of others and distilled it down into a presentation that I gave to a group of faculty.

My goal was to whet their appetites. Not to “convert” them to “my” way of thinking, so much as to show them that there are other (better?) ways to use presentation software — to share the possibilities.

I had a limited amount of time and there is a LOT of information out there. I didn’t know if I’d have another opportunity to share this material with them so I wanted to be sure to include as much as possible in the hour that I had. I wanted to leave them hungry to learn more and to some extent I think that I was successful.

Thanks to all who have commented and linked!