The good news is that, with the technology available today, there is a plethora of tools available to provide numerous options for every learner. Because most of the emerging tools are free of monetary cost, because they are readily available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, and because they are easy to use, there is no excuse for teachers who do not use these tools or make them available to the learners they support.

Flypaper is a versatile presentation tool with an infinite range of potential uses by learners and teachers–to engage, represent, and express. Flypaper is easy to learn and use. It is a downloadable program for the PC, so it can be used off line when an internet connection is unavailable. Still, you can easily share your work online in the Flypaper “community”, or embed it wherever else you want to. Flypaper has made it easy to turn your presentation into a flash file, and you can even upload it directly to Youtube from within the application.

In a Flypaper presentation, you can include virtually anything you choose–text, graphics, audio, video, action buttons, hyperlinks, etc. I particularly like the fact that it is convenient for the presenter to add voice narration. A presentation may be a single page, or it may contain multiple “chapters” with as many pages as you want.

Flypaper encourages you to download “models” created by other users, and to use these models as templates for your own work. Flypaper offers tutorials for new users, as well as user forums. There is also a well organized 114 page user manual in pdf format.

I’ve embedded an example of a Flypaper presentation here that merely hints at the potential of the application.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

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

VoiceThread has been my favourite digital story-telling application since it first appeared earlier this year. That’s mainly because it’s so easy to either speak or write about images, and then share it all. This not only makes VoiceThread versatile, it also makes it accessible to individuals who face challenges with writing. The potential uses of VoiceThread by learners and teachers are unlimited.

Now they’ve made VoiceThread even better! This week, the VoiceThread team has introduced a “Pro” version that they are making available to K-12 educators free of charge. (While a powerful free version will continue to be available, at less than $2.50/month the Pro features are a bargain for anyone who is not an educator!)

I haven’t yet had a chance to try them all out, but here are just some of the new Pro features:

• the animated “Doodler” offers the ability to draw on an image while commenting;
• multiple identities for one registered user–excellent for classes or groups of students;
• expanded media uploading options–jpg, gif, bmp, png, ppt, pps, pdf, doc, xls, also directly from Flickr or Facebook;
• comment moderation;
• easier sharing and embedding options;
• enhanced ability to enlarge and project VoiceThreads on a large screen.

You need to go to VoiceThread and see for yourself, but I’ve embedded a couple of threads below that I think illustrate at least a little of VoiceThread’s potential–one done by a grade 5 class and the other from grade 1.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

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

Quite often these days I’m surprised to encounter colleagues who have never heard of slideshare. It is a marvelous resource for sharing all manner of presentations, and it’s such a great place to do initial research on current topics, that I mistakenly assume everyone uses it. I shouldn’t be so surprised because slideshare only celebrated its first anniversary last week.

slideshare (online resource) Here’s a quintessential free Web 2.0 application that consists entirely of user-generated content that is shareable, searchable, and often downloadable. As its name suggests, slideshare hosts slideshows; and anyone can create a free account and upload to slideshare. Uploads can include PowerPoint, pdf, or OpenOffice (odp) file formats.

Uploaded files on slideshare can be tagged to facilitate topical searching. As well, slideshare facilitates comments, favorites, etc. It also provides forums for specific communities built around shared interests.

This summer, slideshare became even more powerful by introducing the concept of “slidecasts”. You are now able to upload audio commentary and/or musical accompaniment. The audio file must be hosted elsewhere on the net, but this isn’t difficult to do, and there are several sites where audio files may be hosted free of charge. Our Media and MediaMax are two examples.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision ways of using slideshare for professional development and collaboration. I believe it also holds great promise as a platform that learners at all levels can use for digital story-telling.

Check out my first attempt at slidecasting. If putting this demonstration and tutorial here helps get the word out about WordTalk, then so much the better. Just click the green start button. You may have to wait for buffering.

[slideshare id=77433&doc=word-talk1763&w=425]

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

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

Today I’m featuring a remarkable resource that has been made available to the world by a school in Courtenay, British Columbia. This online library is a tribute to the vision, talent and effort of Stewart Savard, the school’s librarian. It so happens that Courtenay is where I live, and it’s an honour to know Stew, and to get to work with him on occasion.

Courtenay Middle School Library (online resource) The growing collection of digital resources housed on this Vancouver Island middle school’s website is truly remarkable. In addition to some resources that you can download, there’s an extensive and well organized catalogue of links to some of the very best online resources available anywhere.

There is much of value here to middle school learners and their teachers everywhere. By virtue of the multiple ways that users can access material on the site, and because of way the library identifies the reading level of the material, the library is built firmly on UDL principles. (UDL= Universal Design for Learning)

Downhill skiing has provided the model for rating the degree of reading challenge for each catelogued item, as illustrated below:

Material is organized by unit under main subject headings and sub-headings. For example, under Social Studies, there are four main sub-headings: History; Current Events; Geography; Research Topics. Under History, you then find the following units: Ancient China; Ancient Egypt; Ancient Greece; Early Humans; Indian Empires; Mesopotamia; Middle Ages; Mongol Empire; Renaissance; Roman Empire. For each of these units, resources are organized under a helpful Table of Contents.

There’s a terrific Free Audio Book collection, with links to audio files of recorded human readers. There’s also a collection of novels available for “Assisted Reading“. The latter includes text files that can be downloaded for use with e-text reading software, as well as some KESI files that open in Kurzweil 3000. KESI files are available to download for some of the material catalogued under other subject headings as well.

There is much more at Courtenay Middle School’s online library, but no description I offer would do it justice. It needs to be explored and used to be fully appreciated.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

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

Today, I’m looking at another incredible resource that benefits countless people around the world. I find it inspiring that such a high quality and valuable resource is produced and presented to the world by a community of dedicated volunteers.

LibriVox (online resource) The mission of the folks at LibriVox is the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain”. The ultimate goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. This has resulted in an extensive, and rapidly growing, collection of books that have been read aloud and recorded by volunteer readers.

The audio files are available for download from the LibriVox website. There are three format options for each selection–64kbps mp3, 128 kbps mp3 files, or ogg vorbis. There is a separate digital file for each chapter of a book. (In the case of Shakespeare’s plays, there is a separate file for each act; and it is noteworthy that at least some of the plays are presented by entire casts of readers.)

I downloaded and sampled several files at random. In every instance, the quality of both the reading and the recording was excellent.

The LibriVox website has been designed to make it easy to locate any work in the collection. There is a convenient search engine which lets you search by title, author, category, genre, status (complete, in-progress, etc.), language, and reader. You can browse the entire collection, which is listed alphabetically. Or, you can browse one of the four sub-sections of the catalogue: fiction; poetry; non-fiction; dramatic works.

If you wish to keep up with what is happening at LibriVox, there are several options for RSS subscription. Of course, LibriVox would also welcome your contribution if you were to volunteer.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

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

Web 2.0 applications are proliferating so rapidly that it is impossible to keep up. Many of these applications offer learners and their teachers an amazing new range of readily available resources. These applications enrich learning for all, and they make education more accessible to an ever widening range of learners. The applications of the Read/Write Web also serve to level the playing field because most of them are free to anyone with a computer that is connected to the internet. Today’s featured resource is a great example.

SoundSnap (online resource) Here’s an online community that offers an invaluable free resource to anyone who wants to use sound effects or audio loops in digital projects. SoundSnap is worth checking out, whether you are creating a podcast, a presentation, a website, a science project, or a custom activity for a program like Clicker 5 or Classroom Suite. SoundSnap has literally thousands of well organized and searchable audio files available for download.

Click on the thumbnail below to view the 16 main headings under which the sound files are organized. You’ll also see the total number of files currently available under each heading. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it, and use your browser’s back arrow to return to this page.)

The next thumbnail is for a screenshot that shows the download interface. You’ll notice that you have the option of listening to a clip before deciding whether or not to download. You are told the duration of the clip. You can see how many times the file has already been downloaded and how it has been rated by other users. At the top of this screenshot, you see the sub-headings under the major category of Animals.

If you have audio files that you would like to contribute, SoundSnap would welcome them.

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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.

Here’s a great resource for folks with hearing impairment as well as for language learners and their teachers.

dotSUB (online resource) Video is a powerful online medium that seems to be experiencing exponential growth. Now dotSUB makes online video accessible to an even wider audience. When you upload a video to dotSUB, you can then add subtitles simply by typing them into a straightforward interface.

dotSUB provides a tremendous service for anyone who is hearing impaired. But that’s not all! Once subtitles have been added to a video, the subtitles can be translated into any other language by anyone who is a bilingual translator.

dotSUB has made it easy to link and/or embed videos. Unfortunately, the embedding doesn’t yet work here in edublogs. For a terrific demonstration and explanation of dotSUB, check out the April 26 edition of Rocketboom. [NOTE: Once you get to Rocketboom, you have to click on the image before the video will start streaming.] Incidentally, Rocketboom is regularly sub-tititled and translated. Here’s a screenshot for a glimpse of what you get at dotSUB. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.)

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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.

Voicethread.com (online resource) Here’s another free Web 2.0 application that deserves to be well known and widely used. Voicethread lets you upload images and then record audio comments to accompany the images. Anyone who then views a voicethread can also be given the opportunity to add audio comments. Alternatively, comments can be typed. A Voicethread may consist of a single page with one uploaded image, or there can be multiple images , with each image on its own page. If desired, captions can easily be added to the images.

The user interface could hardly be any more straightforward. It is a cinch to upload images, record comments. Each voicethread is assigned a unique URL that may be either public or private. It’s easy to invite someone to a voicethread; and subscription is also available. The creators of Voicethread have provided convenient options for embedding voicethreads in blogs and on websites. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t yet work on Edublogs.)

Check out the examples below that show what a few early adopters have already done with Voicethread. I suspect that numerous private voicethreads are already connecting classrooms and students in different parts of the world as well.

Animals-Ms. Swanson’s 2nd Grade

Classroom 2.0

Favorite Poems

Flat Stanley Visits Yardley PA

Faces of the World

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Today’s featured resource is elegant in its simplicity, while offering limitless potential. As I see it, Scrapblog is yet another UDL tool that should be in every teacher’s tool kit.

Scrapblog (online resource) This is an online multi-media authoring platform for creatively organizing, presenting and sharing digital media. You can combine photos, audio, video and text in almost any way imaginable. For a fairly thorough overview of Scrapblog, it’s worth taking the Quick Tour that is available on the home page.

Scrapblog offers students a creative way to present and share what they learn. It also gives teachers a quick and convenient way of presenting material digitally, with tremendous potential for engaging students. Here’s an example of an audio-visual Scrapblog on the life and work of ee cummings. (To hear the audio, be sure to allow the entire Scrapblog to download before playing it, and remember that you can pause it whenever it goes too fast for you to read all the text on a page.) Of course, there is also the autobiographical option of using Scrapblog for personal audio-visual blogging.

The intuitive user interface of Scrapblog allows you to be as creative as you wish. You can use one of numerous available themes, or you can create your own pages completely from scratch. For example, backgrounds, borders, frames and callouts are a snap to add and customize. It is also easy to add music and/or narration to a Scrapblog.

The “Scrapblog Builder” offers the user an amazing range of options, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Photos and videos are simply dragged and dropped on a page. Once on the page, images can be resized and positioned as desired. For photos, there is even the opportunity to do basic photo-edits right on the page. Click to enlarge the screenshot below of the Scrapblog Builder. (Use your browser’s back button to return to this page.)

Each Scrapblog is assigned a unique URL that can either have restricted access or be available to the public. A Scrapblog may consist of as many pages as you wish, and objects on a page can be linked to other pages in the Scrapblog. As an added bonus, Scrapblogs can also be printed. This gives you the ability to use Scrapblog to create books, cards and DVD’s.

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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.