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.

Animoto Education Program It was love at first sight when I discovered Animoto late last summer, and I’ve had a great deal of fun with it since. I wrote about Animoto back in October, and then in January. The free version of Animoto allows 30-second videos, but after making only a few 30-second creations, I willingly put down the $30 for an “All Access Pass” that allows me to put together and download an unlimited number of “full-length” videos for a period of a year.

Now, teachers are being offered the All Access Pass free of charge, along with the same pass for each class member.

Animoto is an application that allows you to use digital photos to create videos easily and quickly. The shots are “animated” according to the accompanying music that is selected. You can choose from a variety of music tracks built into the program, or you can upload your own sound track. (By uploading your own track, you have the option of including spoken narration.) Finally, if you aren’t satisfied with your movie, you can “re-mix” and create a new and different version with the click of a button.

The potential classroom uses of Animot0 are limited only the imaginations of learners and teachers. Please take a look at Voices of the World, a project where schools from around the world have worked together and used Animoto to share their national anthems. You can also check out an Animoto example, created in the UK by Doug Belshaw to stimulate interest in a secondary school history course.

As an itinerant, I don’t have my own class to work with; but I do present at, or participate in, numerous workshops for adult educators. Sometimes it’s fun to put together an Animoto video to share before the workshop is over. The first embedded example below is from a Linda Burkhart workshop in Vancouver in January. The second example illustrates a personal use of Animoto–to package and share family memories. This one was of a special day we spent recently with our son and grandchildren.

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Loyal subscribers will notice that it’s been a while since my last post. I’m probably more sorry about that than you are. That’s because there is just so much that I’d like to write about! Sometimes, there are neither enough minutes in an hour, nor enough hours in a day. I’m back with one of those resources that has really grabbed my attention because of the potential it offers to all learners. Thanks once again to Molly, everyone’s favourite Demo Girl, for sharing it and for demonstrating what it can do.

Twiddla bills itself as a free “web-based playground” that requires no set up. Twiddla is indeed an online tool that offers a real time collaborative white board where people can work together to accomplish a variety of tasks with all manner of digital media. I think there’s also potential to use Twiddla as a presentation tool, as a study aid, and for creative expression.

For collaboration, Twiddla offers a whiteboard that can be shared by multiple users, as well as built-in audio and/or text chat that allows people to communicate conveniently while working together. In addition to putting whatever you want on the virtual whiteboard to brainstorm, or to create an effective presentation, you have the opportunity to bring web pages into Twiddla and to mark them up. It seems to me that marking up web pages is a terrific study aid for the learner or teacher who is doing or sharing online research.

Twiddla’s user interface is straightforward and extremely easy to use. Molly’s screencast at DemoGirl.com shares some additional features and does an excellent job of showing how it all works. I’ve embedded that here for your convenience. If you want to see a larger version of the screencast, you can do just that by going directly to DemoGirl.com.

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.

FACEinHOLE is a website that offers some fun with image manipulation. The concept is simple. You upload an image and plug it into a “scenario”. Then you have an intuitive set of tools to adjust size, orientation, colour and contrast to make it fit. Any creative teacher will be able to find ways to make use of this application to enrich the classroom. It is easy to share what you create, either by embedding on a web page or by sending someone the URL.

Here are a couple of examples of what you can make with FACEinHole–pictures of me in some of my “other lives”.

Mixbook is one of a growing number of online applications that facilitate the creative sharing of digital images. Mixbook is different than most because of its book-like format, and because of its convenient options for including text. With this application, you can create books of up to at least 100 pages. Mixbooks can be created and shared online for free, but with Mixbook you also have the option of purchasing a hard copy of your book. Paper Mixbooks can now be shipped anywhere in the world.

I believe there are many occasions in the “classroom” when it would be powerfully motivating to be working toward the creation of an actual book. I think this might be especially appropriate for collaborative projects involving either entire classes or small groups. For example, a class might like to work together to create a “year in review” book, a special report on a class field trip, or even an anthology of student poetry.

For classroom use, I think it is especially helpful that any Mixbook page may contain images and/or text. Pages may contain only text, only images, or almost any imaginable combination of text and images. This allows for tremendous flexibility in presenting projects of all kinds. The screenshots below show only the first 48 possible page layouts from the nearly 200 that are available.

I have not yet ordered a paper Mixbook, but I have worked on a couple of online Mixbooks. It is a snap to use sets of photos from Flickr to create a Mixbook. Although I was unable to conveniently embed a published Mixbook here on my Edublogs blog, I had no difficulty embedding it on a pbwiki page. [See below for new info on embedding in Edublogs.]

The screenshot below shows the cover of a Mixbook I put together with a set pictures of the Comox Glacier, a defining landmark of the community where I live. If you wish to see the original in Mixbook, click here. If you’d like to see how it came out when embedded on a pbwiki page, click here.

[After I wrote this post, Andrew Laffoon of Mixbook, has posted instructions for embedding Mixbooks on Edublogs. He plans to add the instructions to the Mixbook site.  Hopefully, he'll also be able to streamline the process. For now, click here if you want to know how. It may also be helpful to know that Andrew blogs about Mixbook blogs here.]

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

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

This is a holiday season for people of different faiths and traditions around the world. I’ll be celebrating Christmas, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Here’s a free resource that facilitates using your own photos to create and share online greeting “cards” with digital photos.

Picnik is an online photo editing application. A premium version is available for paid subscription, but there many editing functions and features available for free. The function I like best is the convenient option of adding text. Currently, there is also a free collection of Christmas shapes that can be added to your pictures.

Another feature of Picnik that I appreciate is its ability to link directly to my Flickr account. I can edit photos that I’ve uploaded to Flickr and then either replace the original or create a new file and add it to Flckr. You can also link Picnik to photos that you have in Picasa Web Albums, facebook, photobucket, or webshots.

Here’s a Christmas card for you that I’ve created with Picnik.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

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

I’ve just arrived home from Closing the Gap. It will take a while to process everything I experienced and learned in Minneapolis. I do know that I was very impressed with Version 4 of Classroom Suite, which was launched at the conference. This new product from Intellitools has incorporated something called “smart scanning”, and this will make a huge difference to learners who use switches for step scanning!

As for free resources, I was introduced to so many great new options that it will take me a long time to put up posts even of the best of the best. I already have a huge backlog of free resources that I want to share. It was a special treat to attend the presentations on free internet resources by Paula Walser from Wisconsin and by Sigudur Jonsson from Iceland. It is definitely hard to keep up with all the terrific stuff that is out there! Today’s post is about Animoto. I’ve been having fun with this since the summer, and I’ve been meaning to write about it since then.

Animoto (online resource) Here’s yet another nifty Web 2.0 opportunity for digital story-telling. This one is a lot of fun and will engage plenty of learners, as well as many of their teachers. With Animoto, you can combine a set of still photos with a music track to create a free 30 second video with considerable dramatic flare. Here’s something I threw together very quickly to play just before our presentation at Closing the Gap. It ends by contrasting the hard working member of our presentation team with the other guy.

You can select from 3 genres of music provided by Animoto (indie rock, electronica, hip hop). The application then blends the music with the way it presents the pictures. Or, you can upload your own music track. If you’re not entirely happy with the way it comes out, you can “re-mix” the video with touch of a button for something completely different. If you wish, you have the option of adding or deleting photos or of changing the order.

Animoto does not offer an option for including voice narration, but there’s nothing to stop you from mixing voice with a music track in Audacity and then uploading that.

Photos can be uploaded from your computer, or imported from online hosts. Animoto has provide quick links for importing pictures from flickr, facebook, smugmug and photobucket.

Of course, Animoto has made it easy to share whatever you create by offering a unique URL for each creation. Sharing work online is often powerfully motivating for the learners we work with. The embed code makes it easy to embed an Animoto video in a blog or on a wiki. There is also a “Post Online” feature which makes it easy to post your video to MySpace, FaceBook or Friendster.

Here’s one of the first Animoto videos I put together. It shows my wife Lynn taking pictures while we were exploring the California coast in August. I called it “Clickin’ with Lynn” and I used a music track provided by Animoto, entitled “Picture in My Head”.

If you wish to make a “full length” video (about 3 and a half minutes), you can do so for $3.00. A one year subscription that allows you to make as many full length videos as you wish costs $30.

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.

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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