Cool Free Tools

From CLEW Wiki

This article offers some free or demonstration software available on the Internet that instructors or students might find interesting.

Contents 1 Considerations 2 Cool Free Tools 2.1 Productivity 2.1.1 Scheduling 2.2 Multimedia 2.3 Communication 2.4 File Sharing 2.5 Graphics 2.6 Assistive Software 2.7 Resources 2.8 Online Web or Presentation Tools 2.9 Social Media 2.10 Software Applications 3 Related Articles

Considerations

The article below from Educause discusses the issues to consider when linking third party applications into sites. You might find it helpful to point out some issues you may not of thought of.

Educause - Policy as an Enabler of Student Engagement
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 5 (September/October 2010): 104–105 by Merri Beth Lavagnino

Institutions are now struggling to accommodate pedagogical advances without putting the institution at risk for lawsuits. This article discusses the complexity of instructors adding third-party tools and social media for student engagement into their course-sites. Considerations about issues such as privacy, security and intellectual property or copyright implications are explored and some guidelines are suggested. Additional links to other sites discussing the issues are available in the Notes section at the bottom of the article.

Cool Free Tools

Please forward information about your favorite resource(s) that you've found in your journey using the web to clew@uwindsor.ca so we can share with each and build this resource. Here are a few of our favorites with their links under some categories we've started. If your resource doesn't fit into the categories we've set up, please feel free to let us know where you think it might fit. Make sure you've tested your resource first before recommending it, and if you have any cautionary notes about its use, please let us know. In the future, this page will be able to be updated by members of the University of Windsor campus directly, so stay tuned!

Productivity

• Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.

• Google Docs http://docs.google.com/ Create and edit web-based documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Store documents online and access them from any computer. Supports sharing and collaborative and concurrent editing.

Scheduling

• Doodle http://www.doodle.com provides an online scheduling tool that you can select out mutually agreeable times amongst a number of people and times, to help making meeting or event planning smoother. It is free of charge and doesn't require registration.

Multimedia

• Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Audio editor for recording, slicing, and mixing audio.

• Jing http://www.jingproject.com Take screenshots or record video of online action and share it over the web.

Communication

• Google apps http://www.google.com/apps/ Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication & collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. See the top 10 reasons to switch your school to Google Apps.

• Skype http://www.skype.com Talk, chat, video, file share and screen share for free.

File Sharing

• DropBox http://www.dropbox.com Up to 2 GB of free online file storage space. You can share files with friends and software will map a network drive to your computer which will synchronize when you save your documents.

Graphics

• Flickr Photo sharing site. http://www.flickr.com/

• GIMP http://www.gimp.org The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor.

• Irfanview http://www.irfanview.ca IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003.

Assistive Software

• Adaptech Research Network - http://www.adaptech.org/en/news/2011-09-04-updated-database-free-inexpensive-computer-technologies hosts an updated database of free & inexpensive computer technologies.

Resources

• Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org Online public editable encyclopedia

• Wikimedia resources http://www.wikimedia.org Open access dictionary, wiki software, news, university, books and more

• PB wiki http://pbworks.com Online collaboration tool. Provides hosted wikis so no need to install or maintain your own.

• DiRT https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com The Digital Resource Tools list. Full of suggestions of tools to let you do all sorts of things: analyze data or text, create mashups, mine, search, share, annotate, visualize, collaborate, etc.

Online Web or Presentation Tools

• Prezi http://prezi.com Create zooming presentations live or on the web.

• CoMapping (or Cayra or bubbl.us) http://www.comapping.com/home.html Comapping is online mind mapping software to manage and share information. Use it to take notes, plan and organize. It's a way to have one set of notes. One set of files. For everyone.

• Wordle http://www.wordle.net Wordle is a toy for generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

• Voyeur http://voyeurtools.org/ A tool for analyzing and visualizing texts.

• Flockdraw.com http://flockdraw.com This is a free tool with code that you can embed into a webpage that allows multiple people to share a whiteboard, with basic editing tools. It will give you the code to embed that particular whiteboard into a webpage. To use in CLEW, you can create a html page in Resources, click Source to access the html code, and then paste that script into the code. Then you continue on with your html coding. To make that page accessible beyond those in your site, you can set the permission of that resource to public and then share the URL from the Edit Details option of that resource.

• xtraNormal http://www.xtranormal.com Create videos using prefab sets, characters, and videos. Free account includes enough points to make 1-2 videos. Free upgrade to educator account by request.

Social Media

• Twitter.com http://www.twitter.com. Professors may wish to include a Twitter feed in their class as a "back-channel" communications tool. Instructions on how to embed a Twitter Feed into some of CLEW's tool is found in the "Add Twitter Widget" article.

Software Applications

• CNET Download.com http://download.cnet.com Find the software you're looking for at CNET Download.com, the most comprehensive source for free-to-try software downloads on the Web.

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