Audacity is a free multi-track audio editor and recorder. It can be downloaded for both Mac OSX and Windows operating systems. Using Audacity students can record audio/narration, lay it over music tracks, edit them and export the track for podcasts or inclusion in videos.
Help pages prvide a manual, tutorials, a wiki and a discussion forum. A separate tutorial wiki provides access to offsite help.
Twitter's mission is... "To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers".
From the Twitter FAQ page: Twitter is an information network made up of 140-character messages called Tweets. It's an easy way to discover the latest news related to subjects you care about. Messages from users you choose to follow will show up on your home page for you to read. It’s like being delivered a newspaper whose headlines you’ll always find interesting – you can discover news as it’s happening, learn more about topics that are important to you, and get the inside scoop in real time.
Academically, students or faculty can set up Twitter feeds on topics of study/interest and have students follow and post to the Twitter feed, using it as an organizational, sharing and curation tool.
Aurasma is an augmented reality platform with over 40,000 customers operating in over 100 countries. Using Aurasma allows your students to create augmented projects, where every image, object and place has its own Aura.
This PDF Guide to Aurasma is lengthy and extensive.
YouTube Aurasma Tutorial and Webinar Series
Community Support Site
Poll Everywhere is an application that creates real-time learnign experiences through live student participation.
The process is simple:
Poll Everywhere Help and FAQ is extensive.
Social Explorer allows the user to present data in a clear, visually comprehensive manner. In other words, in Social Explorer your students can explore and collect data, review it and create visual maps/infographics to share with students.
Statistics are gathered from 220 years of United States demographic data with over 20,000 socio-economic indicators between 1790 and the present.
Social Explorer is a subscription database, although you can use it to a limited extent for free.
Social Explorer has an extensive help/FAQ page.
Every image contains a story and Thinglink helps you tell your stories through three easy steps:
Pinterest is a visual bookmark tool that can be used with group projects where information from the Internet is being collected and shared.
Pinterest is being used in the library. If you would like some help with getting started with Pinterest contact Suzanne Feldberg.
Flickr is an application you can use to store and share photos.
Looking for open copyright images for classes? Try Flickr Commons a collabortive image project.
Watch the tutorial video below to learn how you and your students can upload photos to create your own collections.
Screencast-o-matic is a tool that allows you to record what's happening on your computer screen - live! This is a great tool for creating tutorials or flipped classroom videos. The help page for Screencast-o-matic offers a series of videos.
Several of our faculty use Screencast-o-matic. Their names and contact info will be up soon.
Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.
With Tagxedo, you can:
Wordle is a tool that generates “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. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
For technical questions try the Wordle FAQ or check out the Wordle Forum in Google Groups.
There is even an Advanced Wordle page where you can weight words to have more control over the way your Wordle looks.
This one is for PC users: To make a movie with Movie Maker, you’ll need some photos and videos. You can import photos and videos from your phone or other device to get started. Then use tools to edit by trimming, splitting, speeding the clips up or slowing them down. You can also choose a theme and bring your movie to life with a soundtrack that you can edit yourself. When your movie’s done, publish it to the web so you can share it with family and friends.
Timeline JS is an open-source tool that enables you to build visually-rich interactive timelines and is available in 40 languages. You can pull media from Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, and more.
The help/FAQ is located at the bottom of the home page - just scroll all the way down. There is also a user forum for technical questions.
The possibilities fro this tool are limitless and offer not only a presentation format for research, but also opportunities to teach about copyright, intellectual property and fair use. Watch the video below for the basics.
Use Diigo with your students (with a free teacher account) or for personal use. Note that while the video specifies a bookmarklet for Chrome browser users, Diigo has bookmarlets for Safari and Firefox browsers as well.
This is Diigo's About page
This is Diigo's Tool Page where you can download extensions and bookmarklet apps.
Evernote is a combination bookmarking, journaling, storage for documents, pdfs, images and audio files, that can be used with a class project or individually.
Contact Suzanne Feldberg for one-on-one assistance.
Netvibes is simlar to Symbaloo in that it is a dashboard that works as a bookmarking tool. It also serves as a news aggregator and offers the ability to personalize your browser homepage to include many widgets and RSS feeds. Plus you can add tabbed pages (kind of like this box) so that you can organize content with multiple pages.
Symbaloo is a personal startpage that allows you to easily navigate the web and compile your favorite site all in to one visual interface. Save your bookmarks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with any device.
Scratch is an online programming language developed at MIT. With Scratch students can program their own interactive stories, games, and animations, and share them with others in the Scratch online community.
Using Scratch helps young people think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.
Use the Scratch FAQ for basic information and the Discussion page to join in Scratch related conversations.
Pearltrees is a visual, collaborative bookmark tool that can be used to organize web pages, files, photos and notes into "pearls" or groups, and share them easily.
Pearltrees site: To create an account
Pearltrees FAQ: All of your questions answered
Padlet is a wall-building application. You can post multiple item on a wal, (imaes, notes, links, etc.) and share them privately or publicly.
Use the Padlet FAQ to answer basic questions on what you can do with Padlet, and Padlet Walls for everything you wanted to know about creating your first Padlet.
Linoit is a great way to organize notes. The interface looks like a bulletin board (you can change the background image) and the idea is to post sticky notes to the board. You can make as many boards as you like, post notes, images, almost anything you and your students want to share.
The FAQ offers a visual of the parts of a linoit board.
The How-To-Linoit page offers step-by-step instructions creating a Lino board.
How to use linoit safely instructions can be found here.
Livebinders are one of the best replacements for a 3-ring binder. Physical 3-ring binders used to be the easiest way to organize all your educational resources. But now so much of what you want to organize is online. LiveBinders not only replaces the old 3-ring binder, but also opens up new opportunities for collaborating, organizing, and sharing that were never possible before. Visit the Knowledge Sharing page for examples of collaboration and curation using Livebinders.
The Education page has several ideas for ways to use livebinders in a classroom setting.
Using Livebinders as ePortfolios are explained on this page along with examples.
Step-by-step instructions on creating your first Livebinder
SketchUp Make is a free 3D drawing tool that can be downloaded online.
The Knowledge Base help pages offer video tutorials, getting started guides, concept guides to learn terminology, and self-paced tutorials.