I came across a great post by Jason de Nys last week that is worth sharing, especially if you are one of those really organised teachers already working on planning for the new school year.

Jason mentioned two tools for classroom organisation:

Termites for creating seating plans

and Monkey, for creating productive groups

Here is what he had to say about each:

Termites allows you to input ‘relationship’ scores for your students. That is, if you think that they work well together you give them a score up to +10 and if you’d rather that they didn’t sit together you’d give them a score as low as -10. The generator takes these values into account when allocating seats. If you have a student who has poor eyesight you can specify that they are placed at the front of the room. If you have a real firecracker you can even ‘glue’ them to the seat closest to you so that you can keep a wary eye on them and everyone else will be shuffled around them.

Creating the table layout is also blindingly simple. You are presented with a grid of whatever size you like. You then click on a box to make it a table and click on it again to clear it. Very easy to set up rows or pods.

And Monkey:

Monkey works on the same principle of entering relationship values but also gives you the opportunity to input an ‘ability’ score from 0 to 100. You then have the opportunity to group according to ability as well as taking into account the relationships. Group size and number is customised in the same way as for Termites and so is ‘glueing’ a student into a group.

They both sound like they are worth checking out.

Clive Dawes and I also had a conversation last week about online mindmapping software. Clive introduced me to Best for Chart, which looks great for any diagramming. The collaboration tools look really easy and powerful as well.

Clive also suggested that Awesome Highlighter may be a good way to get some of the functionality of Diigo without all of the other tools that can confuse the first-time user. I have to say that the additional commenting tools, the ability to share bookmarks to multiple lists, including delicious and the numerous other social networking features make Diigo a clear winner for me.