Free and useful
Most of this was posted over at Teacher Support Network as a resource of free online resources for educators on a tight budget. The post was to go with the usual boo-scary warnings to mark Safer Internet Day, with the idea that along with being careful online, there are all sorts of tools you can use or download and they all aren’t backdoor hacks to steal your ID or send your computer a virus.
While putting it together, it turned out to be more or less a collection of some of my favorite stuff to be found online, so I figured I’d share it here, minus the boiler plate teachersupport.info links to be found on the original. Still, it’s basically written with educators in mind and their potential needs.
Free applications and useful websites
Software can sometimes out price the cost of the computer it goes on and a lot of it is bloated, crash-prone and limited as to what it can do because of various licensing and copyright restrictions. Teachers have both limited personal budgets for themselves and limited classroom budgets with which to supply new and innovative learning tools. Thanks to Open Source and General Public License movements, though, there are a number of cross-platform tools and web-based applications that can increase your computer’s capabilities without wrecking your budget.
1. Video and Audio
Miro for better video viewing. Video is all over the web. But different formats, DRM laws, technological requirements and the like make a lot of it unreachable to a number of computer screens. Miro, created by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a Massachusetts based non-profit organisation, offers a way to watch video without buying a lot of expensive software or downloading numerous different applications to work with different formats. Viewers can connect to any video provider that they want. This frees creators to use the video hosting setup that works best for them — whether they choose to self-publish or use a service. Visit Miro.
2. PhotoShop work without the PhotoShop price. Adobe PhotoShop is one of the most-used applications going for photo editing, design work and for good reason. Its mix of tools allows for nearly unlimited digital possibilities. But it all comes at a cost that makes it out-of-reach for a lot of potential users. Here are a number of free tools that puts PhotoShop quality tools in the hands of you and your students without breaking your budget.
- GIMP. This is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. It’s quickly becoming the free alternative to PhotoShop. Link
- PhotoShop Express. Let’s give some credit where credit is due. PhotoShop does allow for some basic editing to be done free and online with this service that allows you to edit, store and share up to 2 gigs of images. Link
- Picnik. This website lets you “tweak” your photos “to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.” It’s also integrated with flickr.com. Link
- Splashup. It’s an online photo editing tool with an interface that’s very easy to figure out. Link
- Dumpr. Free and mostly just for fun. It’s an online tool that allows some quick, goofy image alteration at the push of a button. Link
3. Video/audio editing. If you thought PhotoShop was expensive, try and get your hands on some video editing software on a budget. Video is growing fast on the web. Here are some tools that can get your own or your class video projects going on a budget.
- Jaycut. Offers an unlimited amount of upload space and an impressive online suite of editing tools. Get your footage looking right and then either download it, burn it to a disk or instantly share it on myspace, facebook and elsewhere. Link
- Bambuser. Broadcast live on the web from your mobile phone. Well, you still need a fairly flash mobile that includes a camera, but if you’ve got that, you have all you need to report “live, from the situation as it develops.” This site allows easy, streaming video from your phone camera. Link
- ccMixter. Free audio editing with instant access to loads of free audio content that you can use how you like with your own. ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. Link
4. Online tools with numerous possibilities.
- Twitter. Twitter is a one-purpose site that seems to be so simple that all sorts of people are finding new purposes for it. Essentially, it’s a status updater in which you simply type in what you’re doing now, which then updates anyone following you on Twitter. Various politicians, charities and celebrities use Twitter to let their supporters know what’s going on or when they should do something. Twitter could be a useful classroom project or another way to let parents or other teachers know what your class is working on.
- Hosted blogging. We won’t go through the entire gamut of possibilities here. The three main ones to start with are wordpress.com, blogger.com and livejournal.com. Millions of people and groups use these to create instant sites for themselves or their groups. One possibility is a class blog for students to report on the progress of a project. Or, just set something up for yourself to let it all out on occasion.
- Ning. Create your own social network. Make it public, or keep it private and by invitation only. There are a couple of other options out there you can google for, but Ning is the quickest and requires the least technological know-how to quickly create a niche social network. It offers loads of security options to make the network as open or as closed as you like. Create one for your friends or colleagues or one for your class. Link
5. Actually useful blogs. Not all blogs are about what someone’s cat is up to or how annoying the morning commute is. Here’s a brief selection that can improve your life.
- Lifehacker.com: Includes online and real world tips for managing your time, diet, workload, computer and more. Link
- Make Magazine’s blog: DIY goes open source. Various how-to projects to be done in the home, garden, with electronics and so forth are detailed here by the people who came up with them. Link
- The Creative Commons blog. “Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.” The site also promotes and publishes numerous tools you can use to create, edit and upload your own content and instantly license it with a Creative Commons deed, letting others know what they are and are not allowed to do with it. Link
Code is poetry.
