A handful of the best
One of my favourite presentations is “A handful of the best” and I am presenting this workshop on Friday at the Waimarino Cluster conference.
The presentation is looking at a handful of cost efficient tools that you can easily integrate into the classroom to enhance learning.
Its my favourite because there are some many tools that you can use. many of them are FOSS – free or open source software. Some, like comic life, are proprietory but warrent a place on the list becuase they are so good.
The list is PC based and does not include some tools like productivity suites because they are not easy to implement or suitable for a 90 minute workshop. Here is the workshop playlist, my favourites (This list changes everytime I present it to suit teh audience and also to suite the new toys I have found).
• Audacity Http://audacity.sourceforge.net
• Camstudio – http://camstudio.org/
• Cartoonist – www.vicman.net/cartoonist/
• comic life (trial version) – http://plasq.com
• c-map – http://cmap.ihmc.us/
• freemind – http://freemind.sourceforge.net/
• google sketchup – http://sketchup.google.com
• pencil – www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/
• photostory – Microsoft download
• pivot – www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/pivot.html
• gantt project – www.ganttproject.org
• rasterbator – http://arje.net/rasterbator
• readplease (free standard version) – www.readplease.com/
• tuxpaint – www.tuxpaint.org/
• exe – http://exelearning.org/
Whats missing? Well the obvious ones for me are
- Open Office – http://openoffice.org
- the GIMP – www.gimp.org/
- Scribus – www.scribus.net/
- Pinnacle’s Spinvideo – www.videospin.com/
- Moodle – www.moodle.org
- openproj – http://openproj.org/
- google earth – http://earth.google.com
- hot potatoes – http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
These are brilliant products but they don’t fit into the small window of time I have for this presentation. The tools I have selected are quick easy and allow the staff and then their students to achieve success on the first attempts.
But I am interested – what did I miss?
June 17th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Not sure if you are looking for online tools but Voicethread is pretty amazing for potential use in the classroom.
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June 18th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Just to point out a fact Andrew and I guess rub it in a little this isn’t so much a PC list as an open source one in most cases.
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June 19th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Thanks Richard. The other name for this presentation is
“Geek salad, with a garnish of open source” I suspect that I have over garnished the salad. I have to say there are an amazing number of low cost or free tools available. As long as you are prepared to look at the support aspects etc these are a great solution for cash strapped schools. I have also found that there are actually more useful open source educational programs than commercial one.
Andrew
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