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.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

Thanks to a comment left by Karl Band, I’m writing a hasty follow up to yesterday’s post about Synthasite. Karl suggested that I check out Webnode as a more feature rich alternative. After examining Webnode in some detail, I am in complete agreement. If you are looking for an online means of creating a website, please check out Webnode.

Webnode is a free online service for creating and hosting websites that is rich in features. I don’t have time right now to use it to create a sample website, but I have spent enough time testing Webnode to recommend it. Not only does Webnode have a richer feature set, it is also considerably more veresatile and easier to work with than Synthasite. The user interface is powerful and intuitive.

Because I like to post video from sites such as Animoto and VoiceThread, I tested this on Webnode. I found it easier to embed them on Webnode than on Synthasite. The one possible advantage of Synthasite is that websites created there can easily be downloaded to be hosted on your own server.

In the interests of time, I’m taking a shortcut and including screenshots of what Webnode says about its own offerings. I have quickly tested many of these features and found them to work well.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

There are numerous reasons for learners and educators to create their own websites. In many instances, blogs and wikis are more than adequate, and they offer convenient tools for adding text, graphics, and multi-media content. In this post, I’m discussing a free alternative option for creating and hosting websites.

SynthaSite has assembled a set of online tools so that anyone can create a professional looking website. Since the tools are online, teams can easily work together to create web pages. SynthaSite goes a step further by also offering free hosting. I used SynthaSite to put together and host a 5-page trial website, where I posted a variety of media. (http://digitalstuffbypaul.synthasite.com/) Although there are some significant limitations (eg. no real options for sidebars), my overall impression of SynthaSite was positive.

The Synthasite user interface is straightforward and reasonably intuitive, with lots of dragging and dropping. Still, SynthaSite is probably not intended for the complete neophyte. For example, there are convenient widgets for embedding video from major players such as Youtube or Google Video. On the other hand, to embed video from Animoto, VoiceThread and PhotoShow, I had to paste the embed code into the “html widget”, and I had to figure this out for myself.

As an experiment, I decided to try and replicate my SynthaSite website with Google’s Page Creator. I was somewhat surprised to discover that while the Google alternative may be a little slicker, it is even less user-friendly in some respects. For example, despite the fact that they are part of the Google pantheon, there isn’t a convenient option for embedding Youtube or Google Video on Google Pages. In the end, I didn’t complete my site with Google Pages because it was going to take too long–at least as long as with Synthasite.

There is one additional, and potentially major, bonus with Synthasite. If you wish to use your own server to host your site, it’s easy to download from SynthaSite as a zipped file for that purpose.

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

I presented an after school workshop for teachers on blogging this week, and I was challenged there by a question about the reading level of blogs and websites. That led to a quick search for an online tool to measure reading level. My search brought me to Juicy Studio, and I’ve decided to write about it here. Juicy Studio offers a convenient online tool for measuring reading level–and a great deal more!

Juicy Studio This website, which can be switched easily to a high contrast version for readers with visual challenges, offers tools for measuring several aspects of website accessibility. Free hosted services include the Readability Test, CSS Analyser, Luminosity Contrast Ratio Analyser, Colour Contrast Analyser, Image Analyser, and Link Analyser. The site also offers several downloadable tools and Firefox extensions designed to facilitate and enhance website accessibility. As well, the site hosts a growing collection of articles related to web accessibility. Anyone wanting to build accessible websites, which should ideally include all site developers, needs to be aware of Juicy Studio.

I’m going to focus here briefly only on the tool for testing reading level. It couldn’t be easier to use Juicy Studio’s readability test. You simply paste in the URL and click “Calculate Readability”.

When I entered the URL for this blog, it took less than a minute to return the chart below after analysing the first page of my blog, including my 10 most recent posts. The chart was followed by a helpful explanation of the three measures at the bottom of the chart. The Gunning Fox suggests that a reader needs over 11 years of schooling to understand my blog. Flesch Reading Ease is a scale to 100, with higher scores being easier. Writers are encouraged to aim between 60 and 70. By this scale, my content is a little on the difficult side. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade measure is another rough estimate of how many years of schooling a reader should need to comprehend the material.

Juicy Studio explains the algorithm for each of the scales in considerable more detail than I did above. It strikes me that it would be difficult to come up with anything more accurate. It is helpful that the test uses three separate scales and that it breaks down the data so clearly.

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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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Today’s featured online resource has the potential to benefit almost everyone. Most of us have either Microsoft Office or Openoffice installed on our computers, but I suspect that relatively few of us are using any of the programs in these suites as effectively as we might. Although Inpics tutorials have been designed specifically for individuals with learning disabilities, they can be helpful for anyone using any of these programms designed for productivity.

[This is another resource I learned about from Kevin Jarrit at NCS-Tech! If you have any interest in using technology in education, his blog is definitely worth a look!]

Inpics.net (online resource) This is a set of completely free visual tutorials. Inpics systematically presents simple screen shots to teach and illustrate how to use of some of the most widely used software in the world today. This includes all the component programs of Microsoft Office 2003 (Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word) and Openoffice.org 2.0 (Base, Calc, Impress, Writer). There are also tutorials for Dreamweaver 8, as well as html and css. The tutorials cover the basics as well as advanced applications.

In the research based design of their tutorials, the people at Inpics have had individuals with learning disabilities in mind. Potentially distracting clutter, colours, animation, and wordy explanations have been avoided. The focus is on tasks peformed by the programs rather than on features. Lessons are presented as mini-projects. Not surprisingly, these tutorials are also accessible and highly effective for people without learning disabilities.

Inpics says there will soon be tutorials for Office 2007, Photoshop, Fireworks, MySQL, and PHP.

The Screenshots below show the first steps in the tutorial on using templates in Word. (Click on the screenshot to enlarge and use your browser’s back button to return to this blog.)

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The free Productivity utility I’m highlighting today has been around since 2002, but it is still extremely valuable for anyone who needs to create and use screen captures.

MW Snap (downloadable program) This small and completely free program is simple and easy to use, but it is versatile and effective screen capture software. If you have any reason to create a screen shot–for a presentation, as an illustration in a document or on a blog, to create a tutorial, or just so you can show someone else a pesky error message–MWSnap will do it for you.

It’s a snap to take a “snap shot” of your computer’s entire desktop, an active window, a menu, or any other region of your computer screen that you choose. The user interface is intuitive and designed for ease of use. (See screen shot below.) Hotkeys facilitate the use of convenient keyboard commands. The program comes with a useful set of Help files, and it is currently available in 18 languages.

MW Snap also offers some helpful ways of working with your screen captures. You can flip or rotate images with the “Transform” tool. You can add frames, or even use the screen shot to create a button for a web page with the “Buttonize” tool. The “Cursor” tool enables you to add cursors to draw attention to specific places on the screen shot. Other tools include a color picker, a ruler tool, a zoom tool, and a tool to give you detailed info about your selected window. With MW Snap, screen captures can be saved as BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG or GIF files.

The program can be downloaded from the website of its developer, Mirek Wójtowicz’s: http://www.mirwoj.opus.chelm.pl/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

MW Snap runs only in Windows.

Screenshots: (Click to enlarge, and use browser’s “back” arrow to return to blog.)

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Here’s an online tool with numerous potential educational applications. Visual learners and collaborators will see plenty of possiblities. This one is listed on the Productivity page.

Gliffy.com (online resource) This is a free online diagramming tool. Symbol sets are available for creating diagrams to represent flow charts, networks, user interfaces, and floor plans. Gliffy is simple to learn, with an intuitive user interface. Diagrams can be saved and printed. Or, they can be published and shared. This makes Gliffy an effective tool for collaboration.

At the website, a helpful video is available to demonstrate how Gliffy works and some of the potential applications. As of early October 2006, there is only a free version available. You must sign up for a free account. The developers say they intend to continue offering a free version, but eventually they will also offer a commercial version with a more extensive set of features.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Today’s featured program won’t be for everyone, but it may prove to be invaluable to those who discover they have a need for it. This one’s on the Productivity page.

HTTrack (or WinHTTrack for Windows) Here’s another completely free open source jewel. This is a marvellous utility for copying entire websites to the hard drive of your computer, including all of the graphics and the internal relative link structure. This means that you can have access to the website when you cannot be online. It also means that you can make a local backup of your own website or blog.

I used WinHTTrack to copy this blog to my computer, and it worked flawlessly. Even when I am offline, the blog opens in my browser, and it looks and functions exactly as intended. I can move between pages, and if I click on an internal link it works just as though I’m online. For example, if I click on a category link, it will bring up all the posts associated with that category.

The user interface of HTTrack is intuitive, and the help files, complete with screenshots, do an excellent job of walking a new user through the process of copying a website. The help files even offer helpful advice on how not to use, or abuse, the program. This section covers issues such as permission, large websites, use of bandwidth, etc. Under the Help menu, you also have the option of checking for updates to the program. This program is available at http://www.httrack.com/.

This program runs in Windows and Linux.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Do you want to try your hand at authoring web pages? Or, would you like your students to begin learning to create web pages? If so,this free software may be of interest to you. This is filed on the Productivity page.

NVu (downloadable program) NVu is short for “New View”, and it is free open source web authoring software that is intended for “non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to kmow HTML or web coding.” It is known as WYSIWYG for “What you see is what you get.” Ftp uploading and downloading has been built in, so you can use NVu to upload your web pages to a server. NVu has been designed as an alternative to Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Anyone who is familiar with either of those programs will have no difficulty getting started with NVu. More experienced web programmers also have the option of toggling to HTML mode if they wish. The developers claim that web pages created with NVu function reliably in most popular browsers. Detailed tutorials are available, as is an NVu forum. For a helpful review, created using NVu, you can refer to http://www.buzzys.net/nvu.html To download the program, go directly to NVu.

This program runs in Windows, Mac, and Linux.