Terence Armentano - eResume & ePortfolio

I’d like to thank TerenceOnline’s mom for sharing this one with me. She should start her own educational technology blog. lol. All My Faves provides a nice visual design for users to easily find the most popular sites on the internet. I’m not exactly sure how they came up with their list of sites, however, it’s a nice and simple way to explore what is out there. It’s an easy way to stay on top of internet technology too. With two new kids in my family, I will definitely be checking out the kids category soon.

Alltop is a very simple and cool site that can help people find what is currently popular, by topic, on the Internet. Their slogan is “we’ve got all the top stories covered all the time.” The page updates every 10 minutes as well. This is a good site for people that won’t build their own custom homepage on Netvibes, MyYahoo, or iGoogle and those that do have custom homepages may find some good new sites to add to their homepage. I personally think it is neat to see what all of the top global news articles are. Gone are the days of having to just rely on 1 newspaper or newsprogram to stay informed. This opens the doors up to deeper acountability in reporting the news. For example, one could quickly compare Al Jazeera Headlines to CNN Headlines side by side and see how each venue spins various stories. This would be a great way for students to hone their critical thinking skills by comparing and contrasting the various outlets of information. What makes one source more credible than the other? Plus, it would be cool to see TerenceOnline added to their topic page on Education. I would like to see Alltop add a search engine to their site. Categories + Search Engine = More access to information.

Here is what the site says about itself:

“We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In this way, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation.”

Happy 2008! I’m back from break and ready to begin a new year of exploring the horizons of technologically enhanced education, critical thinking, global impact, resource gathering, and blogging to share it all with you. To get started, here is a great list of Learning Resources you can sift through to add to your collection. Yes, the information is abundant, and seemingly endless, but those that do something with it, apply it to life, and make things better is what really counts. Plus, it is a wiki so you can add to it if you are so inclined. Institutions of higher education should be excited about an information based economy and the revolution of knowledge that is going on in the world. However, they should also be concerned if core faculty are not readily embracing it and in fact fighting the rapid exchange of information.