Freebyte’s Guide to Free Graphics Software offers an extensive collection of links to sites where free graphics-related software is available. This is free software for download and installation on your computer. (The site does not link to online applications.) The majority of programs listed run in Windows, but there are some for Mac and Linux.

The list of programs is organized helpfully by category, as illustrated in the screenshots below. The quality of the listed titles I am already familiar with is generally high, so I expect it will be worthwhile to explore more of the software listed here.

SchoolForge.net has an important and worthy overarching mission:

SchoolForge’s mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. We advocate the use of open texts and lessons, open curricula, free software and open source in education.

I believe this cause is worth supporting. One practical outcome of the work of the SchoolForge community is a website that lists, describes, and links to over 80 online resources that are free of monetary cost to educators. These are mostly downloadable programs that run in Linux and Windows, with a lesser number also available for Mac. Some of the listed applications are browser based.

Resources at SchoolForge are categorized in a helpful user-friendly manner. The screenshot below shows the main headings.

Accessibar is a toolbar that can be installed as an add-on for the Firefox browser with a set of tools to make the internet more accessible for people with special needs. Accessibar is especially useful for those with low vision. As with all toolbar icons in Firefox, the toolbar shown below can include text that names the function of the icon. All of the Accessibar functions can also be activated with keyboard shortcuts that can be configured by the user.

In the words of the toolbar’s developers, here’s what the Accessibar tools will do for you.

• Web page fonts and background colors can be changed from a selecton of 70 colors on current session
• Icons with configurable shortcut keys to increase and decrease Font size.
• Line spacing can be increased or decreased to five different spacing settings incrementally.
• All images (including Flash) displayed on a web page can be selected as being hiden or shown.
• All changes made to web page display can be restored to original page settings by pressing “Restore Page“.
• Changes made to the currently displayed web page persist until “Restore Page“ is selected.
• Integrated Text To Speech reader. Reads out strings hovered over as well as focused elements.
• Reader settings can be configured allowing the selection of the voice, volume, speaking rate, pitch, and voice range.
• Toolbar functions have configurable Hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts).

I tested Accessibar’s text-to-speech function, and I found it to work reasonably well. It does an especially good job of reading links and buttons. As a sighted reader, however,I much prefer to use CLiCk,Speak for reading passages of text. I wonder if it might be the same for individuals with low vision if they are able to use Accessibar’s tools to enable them to see the web page effectively. I added the CLiCk,Speak buttons to the Accessibar toolbar. The only drawback is that there are no keyboard commands for the CLiCk,Speak buttons.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

Today I’m writing about a website that I’m really excited about. It is the kind of website that I support wholeheartedly, a site that I think everyone should visit! Many thanks to Sharon Peters for mentioning it on Twitter.

Open Source Living is a site that catalogues the best free open source software available today. Programs are listed by category, with a separate page for each category, eg. Web++, Graphics & Photo, Video, Audio, Documents, etc. For each listing, there is a brief description as well as a direct link to the download site.

There isn’t a category at OSLiving specifically for education, but I was pleased to discover programs such as Celestia and Stellarium listed under Entertainment. Under all headings there are programs with educational applications.

Open Source Living has been established by a UK based blogger named Andrew, and it is his intent that it be a community project. Andrew welcomes input via a forum, but his intention is to move the site to a more interactive WordPress platform. I am already familiar with much of the software listed by OS Living, but there are many titles there that I still need to explore. I will also be submitting some suggested educational titles such as Childsplay, Tux Paint and Tux Typing. It is noteworthy that OSLiving will only list software that complies with the Open Source Initiatives guidelines.

On my blog, I share educational resources of all kinds that are free of monetary cost. I believe that open source software is in a very special class of its own. When the code for programs is open, there is always far greater potential for the software to meet the needs of diverse users. In a recent post, I illustrated how this has been working with add ons that make the open source Firefox browser more accessible to individuals with special needs.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

Here’s a wiki that I have been waiting for. I’ve already signed up for an account, and I hope I will be able to find time to become a contributor.

DownloadpediA This is a wiki built on the Mediawiki platform, and it bills itself as “The Software Encyclopedia”. The focus is on free and open source programs. Listings are helpfully organized with concise but useful descriptions. The screenshots below show the main menu and then the contents of the Free Software page. The listings under Education are not extensive yet, but I expect this section will grow considerably over time.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

This morning I’m writing from SeaTac Airport en route from Vancouver Island to Minneapolis for Closing the Gap. At the conference, my colleague Jane Rondow and I will be presenting a session entitled “Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education“. Imagine that! If by chance you are going to be at the conference, please stop by and say hello. Our session is scheduled for 8 o’clock on Thursday morning. I won’t be at all offended if you just pop in and say Hi, and then dash off to another session. On the weekend I spent a few minutes looking at some of the information that is available at Google Analytics. I was blown away to discover that there are 650 of you out there somewhere who have visited my blog more than 50 times this year. That got me to thinking that some of you just might be at Closing the Gap.

Software.For The folks at “Software for Starving Students” are people after my own heart. From their website, you can download a CD full of free software for installation on your own computer. I’ve contemplated doing something similar with some titles from my own collection of free software. Now I at least know that it can be done. Here’s what SSS says about what it is doing.

“Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a full-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.”

I used uTorrent to download the Windows CD. The download of the ISO file worked flawlessly, and took remarkably little time. Then I used the instructions provided by Petri IT Knowledgebase to turn the ISO file into a self-booting CD. The download even included a pretty cool CD label that I printed and used.

The following software titles are included on both the OSX and Windows versions of the CD: Audacity; Blender; Celestia; Firefox; GeoGebra; Stellarium; Thunderbird. There are quite a few other programs specifically for Windows or OSX.

The work being done by SSS deserves to be publicized and supported. I think I’ll probably make a donation to their noble cause!

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

I seldom get as excited when testing a new resource as I did when I checked out Jing. For both usefulness and ease of use, it would be hard to beat! This one’s another crossover that blends an installed program with some Web 2.0 functionality. The one big caveat is that this resource may not remain free of charge after an initial period while it is “tested” by the public.

Jing This is a powerful program from TechSmith, the company behind Camtasia. Jing makes it easy to capture still screen images or to create video screencasts, and then share them. This is invaluable if you want to help anyone else learn to use software, or do anything else on a computer.

With Jing, it’s a cinch to make a screen capture or a video that includes audio commentary. Once that’s done, the image or video can be saved to your computer and/or stored online. Jing makes it convenient to share the online version. You simply paste the URL into an email or chat and then send it along. Unless you are going to be sharing the screencast offline, there is no reason to save to your computer. You can go back to Jing any time to retrieve screencasts that you’ve made in the past.

The quality of both the audio and video on a Jing flash file is excellent. I used Firefox to open and view a screencast that I emailed to myself, and I was thoroughly impressed. The files you store on your own computer are just as good. Click here to check that out for yourself. I made a 30 second screencast just to show you.

There are numerous potential uses for Jing. You can use it to prepare a series of tutorials for a course. Or, you can use it for remote assistance when you can’t be there to help in person. When giving a workshop, you might want to leave your participants with a set of screencasts that they can go back to afterwards. I haven’t tried this yet, but I can even envision ways of using Jing for digital story-telling.

Kudos to TechSmith for providing us with a great resouorce! Let’s hope they decide to offer it indefinitely as a free resource to educators.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

The purpose of this blog is to highlight free downloadable programs and online resources of good quality that may be of value to educators and their students, especially those involved in special education.

Why, oh why do so many folks persist in using Internet Explorer?!? New add-ons that make Firefox invaluable as an educational tool, and that make it ever more accessible, just keep rolling out. Firefox is a wonderful illustration of the powerful potential of open source code; and HyperWords is a brilliant new add-on for Firefox. (Firefox add-ons are what used to be known as Firefox extensions.)

HyperWords (Downloadable Firefox Add-on) Once Hyperwords is activated, whenever you double-click on any word on a web page, a pop-up menu appears. This highly configurable menu offers an extensive range of options for the word. A partial list of these options includes: dictionary definitions or encyclopedia articles; searches; translations; unit conversions; maps. It is noteworthy that all menu commands can be activated with keyboard shortcuts.

Hyperwords comes with a tool-bar that installs on the main Firefox toolbar, but I did not find this helpful. It was easy to uninstall it by going to the Tools Menu, selecting Add-0ns, going to Hyperwords and hitting the Options button. This button opens the door to numerous ways of personalizing Hyperwords.

The folks at The HyperWords Project have put together the following helpful 1-minute demo video:

It is worth noting that HyperWords is by far the easiest Firefox extension that I’ve ever installed. All you do is go to their website (in Firefox, of course) click on the button that says “Activate HyperWords”, and then follow the on-screen prompts.

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Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

As I wrote in a post last June, I’ve been a loyal Winamp user since Justin Frankel first put it out back in 1996. Now that I’ve discovered the VLC Media Player, I think I’m finally ready to move on. Although I didn’t know I was looking for it, VLC is the superior media player I’ve been waiting for. I don’t think you can go wrong with this one.

VLC Media Player (downloadable program) This is a cross platform open source media player that works flawlessly with a wide variety of audio and video formats. I have set VLC as my default media player, and so far it hasn’t encountered anything that it can’t handle with ease. The interface is straightforward and unobtrusive. Unlike recent versions of Winamp, there are no features of VCL that have been designed to market anything to me.

The VLC player is extremely versatile. The Wikipedia entry sums this up nicely:

“It is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats….It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Windows CE…”

In terms of access, the VLC player can be operated with mouse gestures or configurable keyboard commands.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Here is yet another set of free but very worthwhile educational activities that have been put together with early learners in mind.

Childsplay (downloadable program) This is a suite of 14 high quality educational games designed for young children. The games have been carefully crafted and have considerable kid-appeal. The user interface is simple, uncluttered and attractive. At least three levels of challenge are available for most games.

Some games re-enforce the learning of letters or numbers. There are several types of memory games. More than one game provides practice in locating the keys on a computer keyboard. It impressed me that some of the games provide excellent practice in using a computer mouse. Childsplay also makes good instructional use of specific sounds in its activities.

Do not be alarmed if your screen resolution changes when you open Childsplay. This change is automatically reversed when you exit.

Childsplay is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Don’t be confused when the website talks about the individual games operating as “modules” within Childsplay. At least for the Windows version, you can download a bundled installation file that includes everything.

The screenshots below give some idea of what to expect with Childsplay. You can click on a thumbnail to enlarge it, and use your browser’s back arrow to return.