Audacity
Cost: FREE
Description:
Audacity is a great tool for teachers and students when a sound/audio recorder is needed. This is a great free tool for teachers or students to create podcasts and audio recordings. The software has the ability to add background music and add cool effects to audio or voice recorded tracks. Files can be exported as MP3 or WAV files.
Project Ideas:
Podcasing, vodcasting, mixing voice and music or sound, recording book selections for struggling readers, foreign language recordings, live history projects
VoiceThread
Cost: FREE
Description:
VoiceThread is another web 2.0 application that allows teachers and students to interact with others from around the world. There is a special section on VoiceThread just for educators. Students can interact with others via audio, text and even webcams. This free program is great for global interaction with cultures around the globe.
Project Ideas:
Global Connections for Pen Pals and Cultural Experiences, Real World teaching about different cultures around the world, Video/Audio Pen Pals
iCue
Cost: FREE
Description:
iCue is a treasure trove for Social Studies Teachers!! This site, hosted by NBC news is a rich source of authentic video, audio, commentaries, and new coverage from their historical vaults. Videos are constantly being added and students will enjoy taking a first hand look into our past. Students can also make their own personal notes and save them on the site.
Project Ideas:
Historical Research, Theme information about news events (Decision 08, etc)., Note Taking site for history and research projects
Animoto
Cost: FREE
Description:
Looking for engaging ways to get your students interested in a lesson or unit? Looking for an activating strategy? Animoto is your tool!! Animoto takes a series of pictures that you upload and creates a realistic movie preview of them. This tool is great for story starters or how about introducing your next novel with a movie preview? This is a must see site and students will love creating "movie previews" for books they read and projects they do.
Project Ideas:
Vodcasting Introductions, Teacher introductions to a unit or lesson, pictoral research reports, introductions to major events
Glogster
Cost: FREE
Description:
Your students will love producing projects on Glogster. Remember those large posters your students had to turn into you on the Revolutionary War or Charles Dickens? Well take that idea and think WEB 2.0!!!! Glogster allows students to create posters online. Of course, they are much more than posters. Others can interact with them and students can even add sounds, video, and clip art. Teachers have the ability to lock down the site as well if they want to use it with just their class. Check out the really cool examples!!!!!
Project Ideas:
There are so many applications for this site!! English classes producing biographical posters complete with video of the person, readings from the person etc. Students can explain how to do difficult math concepts through the use of audio, video and text!! Project ideas are endless!
Vyew
Cost: FREE
Description
Although Vyew does not have a lot of application for the classroom, it does have application for tech coordinators and anyone doing training. This is a free program that allows you to train teachers remotely and share applications, PowerPoint slides, etc. It also has a phone number for participants (up to 100) to call in for your training.
Wordle
Cost: FREE
Description
Wordle is a great site for creating word clouds. Word clouds allow students to create a visual representation of paragraphs and papers. Copy and paste a paragraph from a document into Wordle and watch the visual representation come alive. The bigger words shoudl be more the main ideas of the paragraph. You can change color, orientation etc.