DoIt.im is the best to-do list manager I’ve found for managing to-do’s as part of larger projects. It allows you to create projects and list out to-do tasks to help you get closer to the goal. It also allows you to enter your group members’ emails so you can send them tasks and see when they’ve been completed. Your tasks can be viewed on a calendar by due date, or in various lists according to different characteristics of the task (due date, context, project, contact, etc).

Doit.im is designed to be compliant with David Allen’s influential productivity manual, Getting Things Done (GTD). It’s a great way to get students interested in this excellent method for handling busy workloads at school and work.

The tool has an HTML5 web app which syncs to apps for iOS, Android, and Adobe AIR (for Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop computers). Its eye-candy UI compares favorably with other attractive new to-do managers like Wunderlist and Springpad, while its feature set is more complete… more akin to my old favorite RememberTheMilk. The thing I prefer about DoIt.im is that you don’t have to dig down too deep into the user manual in order to find a workflow that supports project-oriented workflows. Everything is simple and organized towards that way of working.

I’m also excited about using this tool in an organizational setting– the same project-based orientation can help work departments keep everyone together and focused on shared initiatives.

Related articles

• Web App Review: Doit.im Brings a Cross-Platform GTD Experience To The Masses (lifehack.org)
• Doit.im: Tips (doitim.blogspot.com)
• Project-Based Learning (taraprogram2011.wordpress.com)
• Project Based Learning – what did I learn? (darcymullin.wordpress.com)
• Doit.Im: User Friendly Task Management Tool (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Project Based Learning and At Risk Students: How it Can Help (brighthub.com)
• Doit.im, Get Things Done (GTD) Application Made in China for the World (techrice.com)
• Constructionist in Practice (mrsnuffer.wordpress.com)
• Exhausted, But Still Thinking (teachermrw.com)

John Ward, RIP

This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place….

This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Ward, who recently passed away after a long career of distinguished service at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara. He took me from being a hopelessly poor math student to a very capable one in three years of instruction, despite my deep and abiding dislike of the subject. He did this by consistently providing me with high quality materials, challenging problems to solve, and then expecting me to put in the work– or “plug and chug” as he would say.

Think of your favorite teachers over the years– they presented you with challenging, thought-provoking material and then asked you to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. By the time we’re in college, we get used to writing thoughtful essays about challenging ideas several times a week. When we leave formal education, many of us get out of this familiar rhythm, and instead focus on “getting things done”. When we’re in this frenzied state, we are not taking the time to reflect on new information and experiences we get from our work.

The process of taking information in, meshing it with what you know, and breathing it out again forms something of a “learning loop” that fits with a Constructivist idea (ed theory, sorry laypeople) of what high quality learning looks like.

You can think of building your own Personal Learning Network as an attempt to create this “learning loop” for yourself using the tools at your disposal. Instead of a bunch of teachers selecting challenging information for you, the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention. All they ask of you is to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. You can participate in this conversation by writing your own blog, tweeting, organizing sources, speaking, and teaching others in the way that works best for you. This is all part of what we educators call “Life-Wide Learning”, where you are continuously gaining knowledge and building skills that help you stay professionally competitive, personally empowered, and connected with a community of people who share your interests– even after you leave formal education.

A Game of Inputs and Outputs

You can think of building your PLN as a game of Inputs and Outputs. You need to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. You also need to get in the habit of “adding value” to the information that comes in to you in whatever way works for you. That could mean writing your reactions to an interesting article you read, making lists of bookmarks you find to make it easier for others to find relevant information, video yourself demonstrating a skill you learned, or sharing resources with people you think could benefit from them. What you do is as unique as your skills and interests are, but the focus should be on sharing your learning with others who could benefit from it. Though this practice can benefit you and your business, think of it as doing well by doing good first. Most people don’t like being marketed to, but everybody likes getting free, relevant information about things they care about.

My Inputs and Outputs

To give you an idea of what my PLN looks like, I included an incomplete list of my inputs and outputs. Take a look. Next, I’ll show you how information flows from my inputs, through my brain, and out my outputs.

Inputs

• Social Media
  • Google Reader
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
  • Google Alerts
  • Twitter
  • Recommendation Engines
    • GReader Recommendations
    • Twitter Recommendations
• IRL (“in real life”)
  • Meetups
  • In-Person Connections
  • Conferences & Trade Shows
  • Professional Organizations
  • Events/Parties

• Outputs
  • Your Blog
  • Tumblelog/ Buzz
  • Status Updates
  • Bookmark!
  • Videoblogging
  • SlideShare
  • Present in Conferences or Trade Shows
  • Podcasts

Inputs and Outputs: A Workflow

Inputs

A first step towards forming a PLN is to start getting good quality information flowing in to you in an organized way so you can easily consume it at your convenience. My favorite tool for this job is Google’s free RSS reader, titled simple “Google Reader“. Reader allows me to collect RSS feeds (think of them as real-time updates from several different news sites, blogs, and other continuously updated websites) in a simple digest format. It enables me to quickly scan over headlines about anything I’m interested in, read what I feel like reading, and skip the rest. It takes the place of a newspaper for me– in fact, it’s a paperless newspaper where I’m the managing editor who decides what I’ll see! You can choose to include a mixture of “established” news sites (like the New York Times or the BBC) alongside updates from less established sites like your neighborhood activities committee, an industry-insider blog, or vegandad.blogspot.com. You can also organize them into folders like I have so you can switch between your many interests quickly.

Over the years I have collected RSS feeds from major thought leaders, news blogs, and even wiki site updates about information in my field, and this makes sure that if it’s happening in education technology, I’ll see an update in my Reader. I can honestly say that the time I have spent building my Reader into a well-rounded reflection of my interests has made me a more marketable and able worker, and a more empowered individual.

Enough sales pitch– let’s get started!

1. Get a Google Account.
2. Go to Google Reader.
3. follow the steps in the video “Welcome to Google Reader“.

After those steps, you should have a Google Reader with at least a few feeds in it. You might also want to check out these celebrity GReader reading lists by popular bloggers and intelligentsia types that you can simply add to your Reader.

From this point, you can be on the lookout for RSS feeds on your favorite websites, blogs and wikis. The RSS symbol

will appear in your browser’s address bar whenever you are on a website that features RSS feeds. Just click it and it will help you add updates from that page to your Google Reader!

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically RSS-powered blogs which contain audio and video files and are usually consumed on an iPod or smartphone. They are another very important part of my information intake every week. Just like my blogs, I line them up in a podcast player for when I’m ready to hear them (driving, walking the dog, etc.) and I don’t worry about it if I miss them. It’s like a DVR for interesting audio and video shows on a whole range of topics.

Most people subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, and then let iTunes sync the media to their player. I recently discovered that my Android phone’s Google Listen podcast player can actually use a Google Reader folder as its podcast subscriptions folder and download podcasts over the air! Here’s my list of favorite podcasts– all organized by Google Reader. If you prefer listening to news rather than reading it (or a mix of both), check into the top 50 podcasts on PodCast Alley.

Twitter

Twitter is another very valuable place where I can queue up challenging and entertaining ideas from the world’s best and brightest until I’m ready to read them. Some people dismiss Twitter as a frivolous medium– saying “it’s only people talking about what they had for lunch”. I’ve found it to be a vibrant community of smart people in my field giving real-time updates and discussions about newsworthy links, reactions to the news, and thoughtful quotes.

If you’re interested in Twitter, don’t concern yourself with what you’ll write first. Unfortunately, people do tend to write about lunch before they’ve had a chance to see what can be done in Twitter. The best thing to do with Twitter (at first) is to search it. Ask Twitter what’s going on with a topic you care about, and I think you’ll be surprised to find a compelling mix of formal and informal perspectives that you can’t find anywhere else. I watched Obama’s 2008 election on Twitter, and I saw a mix of people from all over the world giving their reactions to that historic event.

As you start to find people whose perspectives and voices you get some benefit from, follow them. It’s a great way to form relationships with people you can learn a lot from. (It might also inspire you to contribute your own voice to the conversation!)

Twitter organizes conversations around topic tags called #hashtags. You can make any word into a hashtag by adding a pound sign to the beginning. Twitter turns these into links to all of the postings on that topic. Website Whatthetrend.com can help you find conversation topics that are relevant to your interests.

To learn more about Twitter, check out the great Twitter Guide Book from Mashable.

It’s worth noting that Google Buzz, the Twitter-like thingy from Google, can subscribe you to updates from your friends in Twitter and/or Google Reader so you can see both in one stream. After you get to this point, take a look in Google Buzz and see if it shows a good mix of news for you.

Next Step: Outputs

In Part II of this post, I will discuss the “Outputs” stage, where you can show off your learning and use it to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Related articles

• Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
• Twitterers To Follow (gfulibrarian.wordpress.com)
• Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
• Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt) (weblogg-ed.com)
• Tearing Down Your Classroom Walls (freetech4teachers.com)
• The Downtime Learner theory (deangroom.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Lost your job? Put down that remote and listen here! Burrowing a groove in your couch is not getting you any closer to that dream job you want. Why not use your unemployed hours to build your resume?

I recently secured my dream job after three depressing months as a laid-off, former high school teacher. I was telling a friend how I made the transition to an Instructional Designer at the university level, and he said I should write an article about it– so here it is!

Last year, I learned of the position of Instructional Designer– basically someone who helps college professors integrate technology in their course designs– and I knew that it must be mine. As a teacher I have grown increasingly interested Web 2.0 tools as a way to enhance learning in the 21st Century. This interest has inspired me to explore blogging, not just for my class but as a way to document my own learning on topics of tech in education. It also led me to my current love affair with WordPress (both as a blogger and designer).

When I got laid off last August, I decided I wanted to use the time to learn WordPress (how to set one up, design it, and understand it deeply), and to get involved with organizations that were doing cool things with computers here in the Bay Area. I thought (rightly, it turns out) that if I stay active and keep exploring the road between me and an Instructional Designer position, it could only be a good thing.

I started volunteering with the Marin Computer Resource Center, a non-profit that takes donated old “e-waste” computers and rebuilds them into working machines, then gives them to people in need. They are awesome. They taught me how to take old computers apart, fix ‘em back up, and install Linux on them. I got a free education in computer repair, saved some landfills, helped some people, and my awesome manager Benji offered to serve as a reference for me in my job hunt. Even without a job, I had an employer who was willing to rave about me. This paid off later…

I joined a number of Meetup.com meetups related to blogging, social media, and web design. These free or low-cost meetups helped me meet a lot of people with interesting experiences in the field I wanted to go into. It was great to get a sense of what the world of hardcore bloggers & designers looks like from the inside, and to learn more about current issues in the field.

This led me to an amazing resource in Oakland called TechLiminal, a technology salon where they host classes, evangelize WordPress and Drupal, and help community members take advantage of social media technology. One morning I went down there and introduced myself, and was surprised to find that I could come hang out and work, learn WordPress design, and sit in on classes. I told Anca, the owner, about my passion for blogging and my experience as a teacher, and she asked if I would like to guest-host the Blogger’s Support Group on Friday afternoons?

That experience led to an ongoing teaching position at TechLiminal, working with bloggers and serving as a writing coach and WordPress geek. It didn’t pay very much at all (it was donation-based, so I usually walked out with less than it cost to park!) but the experience was invaluable. We would raise questions and challenges that drove my learning forward, and they forced me to write constantly, which I did– about educational technology.

To keep up with the “Blogging Challenge” we set ourselves, I wrote a post or two per week, discussing various Web 2.0 technologies and how they might be used in the classroom. I learned more about how to publicize my blog and attract viewers using social bookmarking tools.

After a few weeks of this intensive writing schedule, I realized that I had a pretty decent collection of interesting articles here at TedCurran.net, so I got a free email address at this domain, ted[at]tedcurran.net, and started adding it to my resume.

Not too long later, I got an interview with a university, and my “boss-to-be” noticed my email address, put TedCurran.net into her web browser, and saw real, written evidence of my understanding of tech in education. A blog, when done right, is an ongoing document of your thinking, learning, and growth on a certain topic.

During the interview, she told me that she had read my blog and that she was impressed with the ambition it shows– that I actually stayed active and kept growing while I was out of work. I can only think how much more attractive this made me look as a candidate. I had pages and pages of written proof that I understand tech in ed, web design, and Web 2.0. In addition to the body of writing I had built up, I now had two new employers who were willing to provide a reference for me even in the time I was out of work. I firmly believe that this is what made me stand out from the rest of the crowd.

The Moral of the Story

There’s no better way to prove that you can do the work than actually doing it– pay or no pay. This downtime in your career can be a golden opportunity to regroup, figure out what direction you want to move in, and start working towards it. If you can’t find someone to pay you to do the work you love, start doing it for free and blogging about it!

Related articles

• How to create a blog (heatherwilchesbrooks.com)
• World wide puddle (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
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Everybody loves Firefox. Even with all the other fast, standards-compliant modern browsers out there (like Chrome, Safari, and Opera– sorry IE!) Firefox stands alone for its rich variety of extensions. If you’re using Firefox, you can be sure that “there’s an extension for that”. It’s tempting to fill up one’s browser with every tool that could make your web experience easier, faster, cooler, and more productive. The trade-off is that each extension you use makes Firefox a little more sluggish.

I’ve already discussed how to speed up your Firefox by using different browsers for different tasks, but I’m falling in love with a new tool that is quickly making many of my beloved extensions obsolete. Mozilla Ubiquity, the natural language command line in a browser, promises to streamline your productivity much like the legendary Quicksilver does for Mac.  Think of it as “One Extension to Rule them All”. Here’s how:

First, a quick overview of Ubiquity by Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Replace your Search Bar

Ubiquity has allowed me to take the search bar completely out of my Firefox toolbar. Where I used to have a whole long list of search bars to flip through for every possible search I do often…

…I have been able to add all of these search engines to my Ubiquity so I can just invoke them with a keyword. I just start typing in Chordie.com‘s name, and my search plugin pops up.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!
I can add any search engine to my Ubiquity’s list of commands simply by clicking in the site’s search bar and invoking Ubiquity. It instantly gives me the option of creating a search command for that site. I give the command a name and I’m done!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Not only has this allowed me to get rid of my search bar (and all my search plugins) completely, but it also makes my Firefox extension “Add to Search Bar” (which basically does that task I just described) completely redundant.

Replace Social Sharing Extensions with Ubiquity + Bookmarklets

Social media and social bookmarking have made it easy to share whatever we are reading with our groups of followers. If you’re like me, you send different types of links to different communities. At one point, I had an Firefox extension for Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Then I discovered bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are just like your browser’s bookmarks, except they contain bits of javascript that perform snazzy functions. You can submit pages, shorten links, tweet, download YouTube videos, and a whole lot more.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Ubiquity allows you to make any of these bookmarklets into a command. Just add the bookmarklet to your toolbar, then invoke Ubiquity. It’ll quickly offer you the choice to “Create Bookmarklet Command”, at which point you just give the command a name and you’ve got it!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

How does Ubiquity help you streamline your workflow? Discuss in the comments!

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Image via Wikipedia

Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user-created Add-Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add-ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add-ons you pile on, the more sluggishly your (formerly fast) browser becomes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a few different copies of Firefox– each optimized for your various tasks? Sadly, you can only run one instance of Firefox at a time. Or at least– one instance of Firefox NAMED “Firefox”. Over the years, some enterprising upstarts have taken the Firefox codebase and built new browsers on top of it.

Flock browser is geared for Web 2.0 addicts. It automatically logs into your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail– the list is enormous and ever-growing. Suffice it to say that if there ever was a browser meant for fun (not work), Flock is it.

Another Firefox-powered browser, Wyzo, is optimized for the rabid BitTorrent downloader. It has BitTorrent built in, along with an enhanced download manager, CoolIris, and some other nice updates to the original Firefox recipe.

While each browser has its own intended strengths out of the box, you can also outfit each one with the Firefox add-ons that help you get all your tasks done quickly and easily. What I’ve done is just one way to approach this, but it shows you what can be done.

Firefox

Firefox itself has become my work browser. I have to manage my (Google Apps for your Domain) email, calendars, school blog sites, to-dos, and plan lesson presentations (which for me, involves scanning through lots of photos online so I can illustrate what I want to say). My Firefox is optimized for this task with a few plugins which support these tasks:

• Xoopit for Gmail– shows you a list of all of the files, photos, videos, and attachments in your Gmail, visually
• Greasemonkey– enables me to run Better Gmail 2, Better GCal, and Better GReader from the geniuses at Lifehacker
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see photos in a beautiful 3D interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs
• Google Gears- so I can access all these online services even when I’m offline
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services

On a final note, another great reason to have several different browser is that logging into a Google service as one user basically dominates your whole browser. When I log into Firefox with my work Google Apps account, it gets very confused and buggy when I try to use my personal Gmail for online services. Better to have one browser for work, and one for play. Speaking of play…

Flock

Flock has become the official browser of my personal life. I love its sidebar which gives me at-a-glance views of my Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube peeps while I browse. I log in with my own personal Gmail and Yahoo email accounts so I can access Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and GoogleEverything easily. It’s the browser I turn on when I want to do my own thing.

• Xoopit for Gmail– especially good here for scanning through videos, photos, and files people have sent me– serves as a photo album
• Feedly- A beautiful new front-end redesign for Google Reader that allows you to catch up on all your RSS news while easily sharing it with your peeps
• Greasemonkey– I love Facebook Fixer, AutoPoke, and Remove All Facebook Ads
• Mozilla Ubiquity: This gives me access to my Ping.fm status updater, rememberthemilk tasks, and any bookmarklet that I can dream up with a quick key combination
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see video and photos in a beautiful 3D interface– here it’s a great way to scan through YouTube in a very pleasing interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers

Wyzo

I just added Wyzo to become my dedicated web design/ developer browser. Not necessarily because of anything inherent in Wyzo’s makeup, just because I needed another iteration of Firefox to fill up with all the great tools people have developed to make Firefox an awesome WYSIWYG code editor. This way, I can open up Wyzo the way someone else might open DreamWeaver.

• Firebug: huge tool for seeing the code behind websites, editing the XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and debugging
• Web Developer ToolBar: seems similar to Firebug but with TONS of features. It’s new to me– will learn more.
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services
• ColorZilla- a little dropper tool that allows you to pick up a color and see its hex code.
• FireFTP- Free FTP in your browser. Goodbye, Dreamweaver!
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs

So this is just one geek’s idea about how to transform the various flavors of Firefox into useful tools for your many web browsing needs. As more and more of our computing moves from the desktop onto the interwebs, we will need to have different tools to suit the different tasks we do online. Another way to do this is to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) with Fluid or Prism– creating little “single use” apps that do one thing really well. But that’s a lesson for another day.

Web 2.0 has beguiled us to forsake our old offline apps and turn to the online cloud for more and more of our data needs. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast proclaimed that “Offline is the New Online” when Google Gears came out in 2008. Our email files are no longer downloaded into a desktop app like Outlook via POP3– now we get a browser’s eye view of our data on a remote server in real time. Netbooks, stripped down laptops whose appeal relies largely on web-based applications, are the new hot devices. Our newspaper companies are going bankrupt as we favor online RSS readers, but what about when we go offline?

I have started taking the Bay Area’s underground BART train to work, and ever since I have been obsessed with finding offline ways to work with my data. Especially RSS feeds, email, and twitter links are a challenge to work with, but I wonder what other online/offline travails people are having?

I tried syncing my Google Reader with Google’s Gears plugin and found that RSS feeds often link out to the originating site for the full story. This led me to research which news sites have full-text enabled RSS feeds, and I only found a few (including the Guardian.co.uk, Gawker websites like Lifehacker and io9, and some WordPress-powered blogs).

I’m starting to get into syncing my Thunderbird and/or Gmail for offline use, but I’m often thwarted when I receive links to outside sites whose content I cannot view. Twitter would be another great service to read on the train, but again, the links are half the fun.

I am discovering that there are a whole host of interesting Adobe Air Apps that specialize in giving you offline access to your online data. I just used Flump to download my Flickr library, Netbook to access Project Gutenberg offline, and Birdie to see my Twitter tweets offline.

Are you also interested in seeing your online data when you are stuck underground? How do you go about connecting with the online world?

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I have spent my whole teaching career in small, high tech charter schools, and I have seen educational technology grow symbiotically alongside Web 2.0 advances. I have embraced blogs for their power to tackle a variety of classroom teachers’ challenges.

At our schools, there has always been the expectation that teachers will maintain an informative website so students can access homework, handouts, calendars, and other class information. My first school was using RapidWeaver, a desktop program where teachers designed websites whole and then uploaded them to the school servers. As the school year progressed, the upload times got longer and longer as teachers’ sites got more complex. As a result, busy teachers gradually fall off, leaving their websites as a wasteland of outdated and useless material.

I have discovered that blogs are the ideal way to provide information to your students. Why? Because:

• the most up to date information (like tonight’s homework or today’s assignment) is always at the top
• old posts are saved and can be organized in whatever ways you can imagine
• blogs are free and easy to operate
• teachers who don’t want the extra hassle of “updating a web page” can even post to blogs by email!
• Students can “follow” or “subscribe to” your blog posts so they never miss an assignment
• Blog feeds can be combined so, for example, assignments from all the school’s teachers can appear on the same page.
• Your blog feed can even be embedded in your school’s main web page.
• You can maintain various blogs for separate purposes. I even have a private blog that nobody can see that I use to  take notes on confidential student situations.

The beauty of them is that they are so flexible that you will continue to find new and interesting ways to use them. Blogs are a powerful technology that can be used in a variety of ways to make your classroom management more efficient.

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This is a video we did based off of MWesch’s great work. We started a class discussing how technology impacts our lives and, in one period, turned it into a video that we could share with the wider world.

The students wrote their responses, rehearsed the choreography a few times, and shot it. We made this with the iSight camera in my computer, and I edited it with iMovie ’08 (which has a “publish to YouTube” button on it). The main objective of the lesson was to impress upon students how powerful we now are to create media and communicate with the wider world. By the next day, students were able to see themselves alongside their favorite YouTube videos.

You have to structure the assignment so students are required to write out their answers first– not just improvise an answer. I did this by A) using this technique on a high-stakes assignment, and B) giving students a list of specific questions I expected them to answer.

Audacity is a free, open source audio recording and editing program that students can download and use from home or at school. There is very little learning curve, and kids can easily record, edit, and export an MP3 (provided they have the LameLib, a file required for MP3 output), then send it to you via email. They can also easily post MP3s to a blog using Posterous.com.

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clipped from lifehacker.com Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe Air): Klok, a free time and project-tracking app for the Adobe Air platform, is a great time-tracking solution for multi-platform users, as well as anyone who likes to keep it simple. Simple projects allow you to simply create and describe time entries on a drag-and-adjust grid, or use a template like “Web project” to automatically create sub-categories of HTML, design, text, and the like. You can also use Klok as a work timer using the “Work On” button, and export reports and invoices for clients. Klok is a free download for any system running the Adobe Air platform.

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