Educational Technology Tools and Advice

These are just a few of the many tools or software that is available for your use.  Most of the entries listed below are FREE.  Just click on the logo and you will be brought to the corresponding site for more information.

Collaboration		Create your own social network using Ning. You can choose your brand and visual design, public or private access, and your own members.  You can post photos and videos, have discussion forums, and form groups.
		Edublogs hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs for teachers, students, researchers, professors, librarians, administrators and anyone and everyone else involved in education.
		You can blog as much as you want for free with the use of WordPress.com.  Your blog can be public to the world or private for just your colleagues and students.
		Create and share your work online by using Google Docs.  Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be shared.  Collaborate real time while choosing who can have access to your work.
		OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.
		Zoho is a suite of online applications that you sign up for and access from the Zoho website. The applications are free for individuals.
Media editing		Audacity is free, open source software that allows users to record audio from any basic microphone, edit multiple audio tracks together, enhance audio, create podcasts, etc.
		Windows Movie Maker 2.1 makes home movies amazingly fun. With Movie Maker 2.1, you can create, edit, and share your home movies right on your computer. Build your movie with a few simple drag-and-drops. Delete bad shots and include only the best scenes.
		FotoFlexer is an advanced online digital photo editor that is free.  When using FotoFlexer, you can add different effects to your photos, you can retouch photo to remove blemishes, wrinkles, red eye.  Your photos can be doodles on, morphed, or distorted, just to name a few things that be done.
Scheduling		The world’s leading online scheduling tool, Doodle takes the pain out of finding the right date and time for a group of people to meet and makes scheduling virtually effortless. The basis service is a free online coordination tool which requires neither registration nor software installation.
Social photo-sharing		Picasa is a free tool that lets teachers and students get their digital photos organized and into a usable structure.  Photos can be tagged, sorted by date or filtered by topic or location. In addition, the tool has basic photo editing capabilities built in.
		Flickr helps people make their pictures and videos available to their family and friends.  Flickr offers new ways of organizing photos and videos collaboratively with your friends, family, and other contacts.
		TeacherTube provides an online community for sharing instructional videos.  Using TeacherTube, it is possible to upload, tag and share videos worldwide.  You can browse hundreds of videos uploaded by community members.
		Upload and share your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios on SlideShare. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar.
Social networking		Twitter is a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.  Twitter can be used by teachers to set up “class blasts” that are sent out to students at any time about current topics, timely events or questions, etc.
		Plurk is an easy way to chronicle and share the things you do, the way you feel, and all the other things in between that make up your life, with the people close to you.
		FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.
Shorten URL		TinyURL takes long URLs and converts them in to smaller, more manageable links.
		bit.ly is a simple URL shortener.
Podcasting		Gcast allows you to create your own podcast for free.  Your own audio broadcast, where you can easily record voice messages, mix in your favorite music, and share it all for the world to hear.
		On iTunes, one can find music, movies, TV shows, applications, podcasts, audiobooks, university lectures and more.
		Using iTunes U, faculty can distribute digital lessons to their students.  Audio and video podcasts let students study at their own pace, wherever and whenever they want.
Voice/video chat		Dimdim allows up to twenty people to participate in voice chat, text chat, and webcam viewing.  What makes Dimdim different from other programs, such as Skype, is that screen sharing is also available.
		Instant voice chat for gamers and teams.  Invite up to 200 team members.  Customize your chat URL and click start.  Your conference is setup immediately.
Videos		With Ustream.tv you can experience live video. With minimal work, you can broadcast and chat online with a global audience. Ustream.tv is completely free, all you need is a camera and Internet connection.
Surveys		SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.
Demonstration		Jing is free software that adds visuals to your online conversation.  Jing is a great ‘quick and dirty’ solution for producing simple video tutorials in a hurry.
		Webinaria can be used to record software demonstrations and tutorials.
		CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files.  You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program, a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions, or video tutorials for your class.
		Oneeko allows you to extend you visual content to any telephone conversation in a few seconds and without imposing any downloads on your students.
Screen capture		Screenhunter is a screen capture program that allows you to capture any part of your desktop, a window or full screen with mouse point.  The captures can be saved as BMP, JPEG, or GIF files.
Social bookmarking		Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.  By storing bookmarks/favorites online, users can access their bookmarks from any computer.
		Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.
		Diigo provides a browser add-on that is great tool for researching. As you read on the web, instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of interest to you.  Diigo also allows you to attach sticky notes to specific parts of web pages.
Wiki		A Wetpaint website is built on the power of collaborative thinking. Here, you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the your area of interest.
		PBworks, formally PBwiki, hosts more classroom workspaces than anyone else in the world, and lets you create a simple, secure workspace in about 60 seconds. Workspaces drive engagement and collaboration. A workspace is a live, evolving document – but gives you user tracking and access controls to monitor your workspace at all times.You can make your workspace public or private or anywhere in between. No matter what, PBworks keeps your students’ information safe.
		Wikispaces offers free online space for student collaborative publishing.  Wiki pages are easily editable Web pages that allow users to immediately type documents and have them published in near real time. Since no software is required other than the browser itself, students and teachers can edit their online wiki pages from anywhere.
Animation creation		DoInk is a place to enjoy art and animation, and create your own.  If you don’t know how to draw, there is a community of talented people, and all the tools they need to help you share your ideas. If you like to draw, you can help others.
		ToonDoo is a cool, comic-creating tool. With ToonDoo, you can now just drag-drop or click to create comic strips that express your views, opinions, angst or to just have fun, loads of it!
File sharing		Box.net offers free online file storage — a USB memory flash drive online. The benefit of online storage is that files don’t have to be sent back and forth or saved onto an easily misplaced thumb drive.
		Using drop.io, individuals can privately share documents, files, images, audio and other forms of digital content in private area. Files and media can be uploaded through a variety of “inputs” including; the drop.io website, email, MMS/SMS, phone, desktop applications, and many more.
Miscellaneous		Curriki takes the power and ease of a wiki and allows educators to be part of a worldwide group whose mission is to share free lessons, resources, new media/Web 2.0 tools and activities.
		Evernote allows you to capture information, whether it is text or photos, and have it accessible at any time, from any place, from whatever device you choose.  Everything you put into Evernote is synchronized across all of your devices at all times.
		Librivox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. The books are read by volunteers and stored as MP3 files at the site. Educators are allowed free access to listen to the files, download them onto the computer, burn them to CD for their students or sync them onto MP3 players.