from Welcome to NCS-Tech! by Kevin Jarrett With the approach of the holidays, today’s featured resource is a perfect tool to share with your students before they go on break.
Adventure Maker is a free, visual development environment for PCs that allows creation of a variety of games (all but two types available in the free version):
Image credit: Adventure MakerThe video at the start of this post does an outstanding job highlighting the capabilities of this program and the types of games that can be created (summarized in the graphic above). The
features list explains what can (and cannot) be built into various platforms. The game has a simple graphic user interface to make it easy to operate. Here’s a screenshot (the
overview page has more):
from Free Technology for Teachers by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) 
ImageBase is a personal project of professional photographer
David Niblack.
ImageBasecontains more than one hundred pages of images that Mr. Niblack has released for free reuse and redistribution. In fact, the top of the
ImageBase site says "treat like public domain." In addition to the hundreds of images that are available, ImageBase also offers nearly one hundred free PowerPoint templates.
I saw ImageBase posted on Twitter, but I forgot to note who shared it. If it was you, please let me know.
Applications for Education
ImageBase and sites like it are excellent resources to have your students use when they're creating multimedia projects. By sending students to sites that host public domain images or that release the images for free reuse, you remove the worry that students might violate copyright. Of course, you still want to have the conversation with your students about the difference between public domain, Creative Commons, and Copyright images.
Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
7 Places & Ways to Find Copyright-Friendly Images
Two Good Free Guides to Digital Photography
4 Ways to View the World in Panoramic
Ever wanted to take a small digital image and enlarge it - you know what will happen though - it will go all pixely and look bad...I know there are a couple of plugins for photoshop that resample and clean up the result but they are usually expensive. I've just come across an elegant solution -
SmillaEnlarger - A stand alone image enlarger that does a great job of enlarging low resolution pictures without the JPG and Pixel artifacts. It's open source so it's free to use and pass on to your students. The results are simply amazing - real CSI style "Can you enlarge and enhance that picture?" that you scoff at normally.
This kind of program is really useful for interactive whiteboards when you want to work with sub optimal pictures from a phone or cropped or from the web, as your projector will really accentuate the the "jaggy" low resolution pictures.
Audioboo is a neat site that allows users to record audio via a web interface and then share it w/ others. There are a ton sites that do things very similar such as
AudioPal but Audioboo has one of the nicest users interface.
Give Audioboo a try by clicking
here.
Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo's great
blog for the tip!!
Open Clip Art Library is a site I just found out about from Richard Byrne's excellent
blog. This is one of the best sites around for finding clip art on any number of subjects.
Click
here to give OCAL a try.
Slide shows are one of the most popular ways to integrate technology into education. No longer is it necessary for a person to have a program such as iPhoto or Power Point to create such a thing. Now there are a number of free online sites that lets users create amazing looking slide shows.
Below is my list of some of my favorite sites for doing just that...
Top 10 Sites for Creating Slide Shows
- Kizoa - Creates beautiful looking slide shows, w/ a variety of music, effects, transitions to choose from.
- Shwup - Great site for creating private collaborative slide shows w/ a number of admin features, such as the ability to allow comments.
- Photo Peach - Very unique site that allows users to create quizzes in their slide show through multiple choice questions.
- Animoto - One of the most popular sites around w/ an educational instance - nuff said.
- Slideroll - A very nice site site that allows the user to make private or allow comments.
- Flixtime - Easy to use site where a user uploads photos and selects audio and transitions and then gets a code to embed into their site.
- One True Media - Great site to create animated slide shows w/ video.
- PhotoSnack - Very user friendly site w/ a drag & drop interface.
- Pho.to - Create flash based slide shows and get an embed code to put it on a site.
- Vuvox - An excellent site for creating beautiful looking multimedia slide shows.
Best of the Web V. III is now up online. This presentation can be used by anyone as they see fit. I hope people will find some good resources here. This volume focuses on excellent resources for presentations/slide shows.
Quietube is a handy tool that allows you to watch videos such a those on
YouTube without all the distracting or inappropriate ads and comments etc. Providing YouTube isn’t blocked at your school, this is a great tool for the classroom!
from Free Technology for Teachers by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)
School Clip Art is, as the name implies, a resource for locating free school-safe clip art.
School Clip Art's galleries contain hundreds of files that teachers and students can use in slideshows, videos, and other digital presentations. You'll find galleries for sports, seasons of the year, holidays, and other special occasions.
Applications for Education
If the standard clip art that comes with PowerPoint or Keynote doesn't have what you're students need, have them browse through the galleries of
School Clip Art.
Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
NASA eClips
Open Clip Art Library
ViewPure is an excellent site for "housing" YouTube and removing all inappropriate/distracting content (comments, ads, etc.).
Click
here to give ViewPure a try.
For a much more detailed review, check out
Free Technology 4 Teachers!!
LIFE has just unveiled a neat new feature that lets you search for any photos in its archives and create an online timeline/slideshow that you can share with a unique url address. Their
Photo Timelinelets you use their original captions or you can edit them and create your own, as well as writing your own description for your whole creation.
After you log-in (you can do so using your Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, or Google accounts — it would be nice if they allowed on site registration, but I guess you can’t have everything!), it’s just a matter of searching and dragging the photos to your timeline/slideshow.
I’m certainly adding it to
The Best Tools For Making Online Timelines, as well as
The Best Ways To Create Online Slideshows.
from Free Technology for Teachers by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) 
Parents and teachers want to share videos of their students doing great things like music performances, plays, and other presentations. YouTube is one place that you can do that, but some parents and teachers aren't comfortable with that because of some of the "related" content that appears on YouTube. In a lot of schools YouTube is blocked so teachers are have to look for alternatives.
Kids Tube might be the solution to both of these problems.
Kids Tube is a video sharing hosting and sharing site designed for hosting content produced by kids and content about kids.
Kids Tube monitors all submissions and monitors comments left on videos. To encourage students to develop their videography skills,
Kids Tube holds weekly videos submission contests. The contests are arranged around a theme and one winner is selected by the
Kids Tube team.
Applications for EducationKids Tube could be an excellent alternative to YouTube for hosting and sharing the video projects completed by your students. If you're teaching video production and need some project ideas, check out the Kids Tubecontests for ideas.
Flixtime Adds Voiceover Capabilities
from Free Technology for Teachers by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)
http://flixtime.com/
FlixTime, a competitor to Animoto, recently released some enhancements to their video creation services. Probably the most significant of these enhancements is a new option for adding a voiceover to your videos. To add a voiceover all you have to do is select the "add voice" option after uploading and arranging the images in your video. FlixTime will then ask for permission to access your computer's microphone. Once you've granted FlixTime permission to access your microphone you can begin recording.
MovieClips Gets Even Better!
from Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo
http://movieclips.com/
MovieClips, the incredibly useful site with thousands of short movie clips classified in great ways (I’d encourage you to read “Movieclips” Is A Real Find!), has just gotten even better.
You can now create your own “mashups” of their clips. In other words, you can search for a certain them — let’s say, cooking — and put the clips related to cooking together and save them. Instead of searching for the ones you want on the site, you have them all set-up in a row.
Photo! 3D Screensaver
from Digital Tools for Teachers by Steph
http://pho.to/p3d-platform/
It offers free downloads to create Photo! 3D Album, 3D Screensaver and photo web album. It creates a realistic 3D world which displays images. You move around the environment automatically and view the different images.
http://www.yudu.com/
Free Guide - Making Videos on the Web
from Free Technology for Teachers by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)
Creating videos is one the activities that my students really enjoy doing. They enjoy it, in large part, because the finished product is something that looks good and can easily be shared with classmates, parents, and other teachers. Often when other people see the videos my students make, they're impressed and wonder how they can do a similar activity in their classrooms. This guide was created for those teachers who would like to have their students make videos but don't have access to editing software and or video equipment. All of the resources in this guide are completely web-based.
http://www.slideshare.net/elanguages/how-to-resize-photographs-in-picture-manager
How to Resize Photos in Picture Manager
http://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=208
from The Interactive Classroom by Hall Jackson
EditShare is pleased to announce that Lightworks Academy® and Emmy® award-winning editing software is to be made available as Open Source.
Used by editors such as Chris Gill and multi Oscar-winning Thelma Schoonmaker, Lightworks offers intuitive controls, advanced real time effects, 2K native support with DPX or RED, and multi-camera editing features that remain unmatched.
Lightworks already offers capabilities far exceeding those of regular editing solutions and EditShare is working to release its full potential...
http://www.bookemon.com/my_view.php
Download and make books online.
http://picghost.com/
from Larry Ferlazzo's blog. PG is a great site for a mass upload of photos and then editing it for preview/download.
