I’ve finally gotten back into the gym and I’m going to do it smart this time. Time to get rid of this enormous gut. I am seriously a fat bastard (he says while yelling ‘Get in my belly!!’). So this week’s cool tool of the week was discovered in doing a little (and enjoyable believe it or not) research on fitness and weightlifting. I am dedicated to leveraging technology as best I can to meet my goals. The first tool I want to discuss is called FitDay - a great free online tool that allows the user to easily track calorie movement (in and out). Simply create an account and use a simple search and browse interface to find the foods you have eaten today. FitDay does the rest to estimate the entire nutritional profile of your daily diet. You can also (if you really have a lot of discipline) record all your daily activities to estimate your caloric burn-off. From there a bunch of reports can be generated, such as calories eaten, calories burned, nutritional info, weight change and activity progress. You can also define specific nutritional goals for yourself and create reports against those goals as well as keep a daily journal.

Its a superb tool for what it does. And it does it well. I never recorded my daily nutritional profile because it simply seemed to difficult. Guess what? Its not. Its easy if you use FitDay. Definitely worth checking out and potentially life-changing.

I’ve been digging Google Docs for some time now. Google Docs is an awesome free online alternative for Office and allows you to construct documents, spreadsheets and presentations online, easily collaborate on those documents, and export to an Office readable format. All good.

However, I recently started playing with Zoho Suite and I’m convinced that it is head and shoulders above Google Docs in terms of features and usability. Zoho (still all web based and free) has the spreadsheet, document and presentation tools, but further includes a whole bunch of other stuff. Here’s a rundown on what’s included…

Zoho Writer
Zoho Sheet
Zoho Show
Zoho Meeting
Zoho Notebook
Zoho DB & Reports
Zoho Planner
Zoho CRM
Zoho Creator
Zoho Wiki
Zoho Chat
Zoho Mail
Zoho Business
Zoho Polls

Wow! Talk about making a great run at competing with Google’s dominance in the web app market - and doing a good job at it. But wait! That’s not all. They seem to have a series of services and browser plugins available too (beyond those mentioed above). Some of these are free, some have a subscription level that expands the feature set available. I can tell you that I will defiantely be using Zoho in 2008!

I’ve been looking for a tool that would allow you to poll and embed those polls within webpages. Something that would allow you to do on-the-fly formative assessment kind of things. I think I found just the thing with Poll Everywhere. While there is (like a lot of these tools) a paid subscription level of membership, it does (again like most others of these Web2.0 tools) provide a good deal of functionality for free. This includes something like 100 votes for free.

What’s great about Poll Everywhere is it provides a Flash file URL version that can be embedded into a PowerPoint presentation. Ample support documentation has been provided outlining how to do this.

Here’s an example of how you can link to a poll.

The resulting data is arranged for you in nice, clean looking graphs.

The other cool feature of Poll Everywhere is that respondants can submit their answers via cell phone. They just text a given code. Could essentially transform a cell phone into a valid student response system. Let’s start using those things for the power of good.

Now because you only get the first 100 votes for free, I think this would be good to use for one or two limited polls on your blog or homework page or course website. However, I’ve read over on Teach42 that the developers of Poll Everywhere are currently eyeballing the education market, so we should see some better features for classroom integration. This one isn’t at the top of my list, but its worth being aware of. Certainly a cool tool.