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.

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.

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.]

PHOTOSOUP uses Flickr photos and their tags to generate timed word search puzzles. Just type in a term, and the puzzle is created almost instantly. The puzzle grid is 14 x 14, and 17 pictures are used for each puzzle. You have 90 seconds to find as many of the tags as you can. If you wish, you can turn on “hints”. This puts the tag under each photo so you know what word you are looking for in the puzzle. When I typed in terms like “cat” or “house”, I found the level of challenge to be reasonable. As with most things, it got easier with practice.

This online activity is great not only for re-enforcing vocabulary development, it is also a great vehicle for helping learners with the concept of tagging when generating online content.

Puzzles generated with PHOTOSOUP can easily be embedded on other websites. I had no difficulty embedding a puzzle on a pbwiki page. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to figure out how to embed it here in edublogs. The screenshot below shows a puzzle that resulted when I entered the term “house”.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

Larry Ferlazzo finds and shares more Web 2.0 applications with practical classroom value than anyone else I know. Quite often, when I read one of Larry’s blog posts, I immediately try out something that he has written about. I did that just now, and I want to supplement what he wrote with an illustration of one way the application may be used. As an itinerant consultant, I’m “on the road” and away from home this evening , so I used the application to create and send a card home to my wife. I can envisage countless ways of using this app in the classroom.

Postalz is a service that enables you to create and “send” postcards online. This is a typical Web 2.0 application in that you can share your work in a gallery, send it to friends via email, or embed the creation elsewhere on the web. You also have the option of keeping your work private, and available only to designated friends. Comments and “friends” are facilitated within the Postalz network. Also typical of this sort of application, you need to register and sign up for a free account.

As you create your “postcard”, you can choose from backgrounds, themes, and banners. You can add text, and even include “handwriting”. Or, you can link your Postalz account to your Flickr account to import digital photos as backgrounds for your cards. That’s what I chose to do for the card I just made, and which I’ve embedded below. I used a picture I took from here, on the BC mainland, of the sun setting over Vancouver Island, where my wife is.

This is the sort of application that engages me. It may just engage some of your students who are otherwise less engaged than you’d like.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

I use Flickr to store and share my photos. I also use a variety of online applications to create slide-shows and videos with my pictures. Some applications make it easy to import from Flickr. Other sites are problematic. In some cases, I’m only allowed to upload one file at a time. Sometimes, I can’t import from Flickr at all, and I must upload images from my computer. Today, I’m writing about a free utility that enables me to download sets of my pictures back to my computer.

FlickrDown is a free Windows program you can install and use to download photos from Flickr. It seems strange to me, but Flickr itself offers no such utility. Fortunately, Gregg Man has written a program that does the job nicely, and he has made it available to all free of charge.

With FlickrDown, you can conveniently download individual photos, or sets of images, from Flickr. You can even use FlickrDown to search for pictures that you wish to download by Flickr username, Flickr group, email address, or tag. The user interface for FlickrDown, shown at the bottom of this post, is straightforward and easy to use.

You must have Microsoft .NET2.0 installed on your PC in order to use FlickrDown. FlickrBackup is the download utility that has been developed for Mac users. Without access to a Mac, however, I’m unable to review FlickrBackup.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

It’s impossible for me to keep up with all the online applications you can use for digital storytelling. Over the past few days I’ve been having fun with one called PhotoShow. This one is probably relatively new because it didn’t make it onto Alan Levine’s October list of 50 Web2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I quite like PhotoShow, and think it deserves some attention. Here’s a sample that I put together in about 15 minutes–with the cooperation of some of my closest relatives.

PhotoShow is fairly typical of applications for creating online slide shows. You bring in pictures, choose from available themes and presentation modes, choose musical accompaniment from a a range of genres and moods, and add captions if you wish. The choice of themes is not extensive, but each one I’ve tried has created an effective and engaging presentation.

I think PhotoShow is perhaps easier and more straightforward than many of the alternatives I’ve explored. It would be even better if you could upload your own music and if you could import more than one picture at a time from online photo sites such as Flickr. You can do multiple uploads from your own computer.

PhotoShow has also made it easy to share your slideshows. Options for embedding on blogs, wikis, or other web pages are especially convenient. Of course, embedding here in the Edublogs version of WordPress was less stratightforward, and I needed help from Patricia Donaghy to turn off the auto play function.

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.