Educational Technology Tools and Advice

Students, 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 which is good for students. 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.  Create a Ning site for your sorority, fraternity, or club!
		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.  Another great site to create a website for your sorority, fraternity, or club!
		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.  By storing your work online, you don’t have to worry about remembering to bring your jump drive with you.
		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.  If you cannot afford to by the Microsoft Office 2007 Suite, this is a great substitute.
Study aides		Flashcards are study tools. Think of a small 3×5 index card with a question on one side and an answer on the other side. This web site is an internet application where you can create, study, print and download flashcards.
		StudyBlue has one goal… study smarter, not harder.  Tools include class notes, flashcards with reminders, textbook outlines, tutors, study groups, and much more.
		NoteMesh is a free service that allows college students in the same classes to share notes with each other. It works by creating a wiki for individual classes that users can edit. Users are free to post their own lecture notes or contribute to existing lecture notes. The idea is that users in the same class can collaboratively create a definitive source for lecture notes.
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.
Citation help		An easy way to create bibliographies and citations.
		Citation Machine is an interactive web tool designed to assist students in creating citations.
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.  Try making your own ringtones.
		Windows Movie Maker 2.1 makes home movies amazingly fun. Merge together videos taken of various events of the semester.  Use these movies to entice future members to join your organization.
		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.
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.
Social networking		Twitter is a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices. Twitter can be used by students to meet other students at other schools who are majoring in the same area or might be members of the same organization.
		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.  Use bit.ly to shrink large URLs so they can be posted on Twitter.
Voice chat		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.
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.
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.
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.
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.  Create a wiki for your sorority, fraternity, or club!
		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!
		Voki allows users to create their own talking character using their own voice.  Users can customize thier Voki to look like themselves or take on the identity of lots of other types of characters… animals, monsters, etc. Voki lives on your blog or social network profile and will soon be integrated in various IM platforms.
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		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.
		Using Pandora, you can play the music you love.  You can create as many “stations” as you want. And you can even refine them.
		Custom radio that plays what you want. Type in an artist and your station starts playing right away. You’ll get the music you want, along with similar favorites of Jango users who share your taste. You can also tune in to other people’s stations – and they can tune in to yours!