Resources for presenting in front of an audience or to help integrate creativity and artistry into the technological sphere.
Audacity + LAME:
Audacity and the encoder plug-in LAME for Audacity combines a Freeware audio recording and editing program with a powerful plug-in allowing for export of files into a variety of different file formats including .MP3 and .Wav. This allows for easy recording and sharing of class lectures, content, and multi-modal assignment responses.
Itunes:
Itunes is the standard Apple audio and video file player, with a variety of options and connectivity to the Apple store. Has access to Cloud storage, and interfaces with Idevices, but can be slow at times depending on the amount of files and task it’s performing.
VLC Media Player:
VLC Media player is a freeware audio and media player, best used for video and movie showing in class. Is incredibly lightweight and uses very few resources on your computer, making it faster and easier to use than ITunes in most cases for visual content.
Open Office Suite (Freeware Office Clone):
Open Office is an Office Suite, similar to MS Office but free.
CDisplay:
CDisplay is freeware designed to display static images in a variety of formats. It was intentionally designed to allow for easy Comic Book viewing, but can be applied to several other file formats as well, as well as allowing for the showing of Graphic Novels of course.
Skype:
Skype, now owned by Microsoft, is a useful video, audio, and text messenger tool. It provides free communication, with payable options for computer to phone calling as well as conference style video calling. The nice thing about skype is that you can choose to make audio/video, just audio, or just video calls, all while functioning as a useful text messenger.
Prezi:
An online presentation website and a great alternative to powerpoint, as the online nature of the site allows access on any computer or device with internet access.
Wordle:
A crowd-sourced typography engine. Works by crowd-sourcing lists of frequently occurring words in feedback or discussion and creates a typography graphic with the most-used words featuring the most prominently.
Educanon:
A cool resource designed to add formative questions and poignant pauses into videos to make them interactive. Works really well to add some active learning to what would normally be a passive learning activity.
8Tracks:
8Tracks works as a playlist website, allowing users to upload and listen to playlists which can then be tagged and searched based on key terms. Has many studying centered playlists you can share with your students.
Hype Machine:
Hype Machine is a music website that acts as a condenser of music blogs across the globe. Not only does it allow users to read the blog that a music track is featured on, most tracks are also playable by the website, allowing users to favorite tracks or sort blogs by popularity. However, it cannot screen for language, so if being used for an English or Music project, use caution.
Grooveshark.com
Grooveshark is a user-generated music streaming site, which offers a more selective way of finding tracks and listening to music. Catered to the music itself, it allows users to build playlists and add up to 500 tracks to a ‘favorites’ list without a signup, although such an option exists.
Deviantart:
Deviantart is an art site dedicated to personal art uploading, and allows access to decades of poetry, prose, and art from across the world. Personally, I use Deviantart to source out prose and poetry for English classrooms, to help break up the more famous works like Frost, Poe, and the like. Sharing poetry written by teens with teens tends to add a sense of closeness to close reading.
Songza:
Songza is a music player which automatically plays selections of music based on activity. Great for when your class is working away on a task, as you can use music as a reward or just an addition to the classroom.
Powtoon:
Powtoon adds animation to traditional presentation formats, which helps shakes up the Powerpoint glazed-eye look. Designed to catch attention, which particularly helps with student-driven research projects.
VideoScribe:
Videoscribe is a tool to add whiteboard animations to videos you create. Helps if you’re not a visual person, or your drawing skills are a little rusty. Functions as a great tool to help accentuate your teaching, but is unfortunately a paid product.
Animoto:
Animoto is another presentation animation resource, but also adds music, cloud accessibility, and other additional methods to perk up your teaching presentations in individual ways.
Slideshare.net:
Slideshare is a website dedicated to hosting slideshows in Powerpoint format. It functions as both a depository and a search engine.
Glogster:
Glogster is a fairly old visual blogging tool, that can be used either to create informative posters or to fulfill any other niche that requires both information and visual help in presenting something. It also allows for the embedding of YouTube videos in order to better illustrate a point.
Pecha Kucha:
Pecha Kucha is a tool for reducing the size of presentations. It caps presentations at 20 slides to keep presenters on track.
Padlet:
Padlet is a website for sharing ideas and information on customizable ‘walls’ much like sticky notes. Walls can be shared and posted to by classes.
GIMP:
A free graphics manipulator that allows teachers and students to edit and modify images and pictures by their pixels on the screen. This is the best free alternative to Photoshop out there right now.
Krita:
An alternative to GIMP, Krita is a free image/picture program that functions as a painting and editing tool on the same scale as photoshop.
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