These tools are free and will help you create a fabulous range of interactive resources and learning opportunities suitable for the 21st Century student!
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. It is a special type of website designed to make collaboration easy, called a wiki. Wikipedia provides a good starting point for essays, offering clues to essay structure and follow-up links to primary research sources.
TES Resources provides over 50,000 free learning materials including lesson plans, activities, games, powerpoint presentations, teaching ideas and worksheets. You need to open a free account and then you can start downloading!
The Excellence Gateway is a government sponsored website bringing together more than 5,000 resources produced by teachers working in the post-16 learning & skills sector.
A fantastic educational site for all age groups. Very user-friendly. Contains news stories, interactive exercises and more than 7,500 video clips from BBC TV archives. Excellent ideas for literacy and numeracy.
A good-looking, easy-to-use site that offers hundreds of 'how-to' videos and articles on all aspects of practical life - the garden, the home, the family, style, food, health, money etc, all with distinctive colour themes. There are a few adverts on some site pages which can be distracting.
Picknik is a fast, easy, online photo editing tool that allows you to upload your photographs and edit then using a range of powerful artistic and manipulation tools. There is cropping, red eye removal, colour enhancement and touch-ups as well as the ability to produce sticker effects, frames and scrapbooks. Part of the Google community and linked in with Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Yahoo Mail.
A Yahoo-sponsored site that allows you to upload, organise and share your photographs. A useful site for celebrating educational visits or end-of-year yearbooks.
Picasa is Google's rival to Yahoo's Flickr and does the same thing - enabling you to upload, organise, edit, and share your albums with specific groups (e.g. classes, parents, years, etc). Very user-friendly. Allows you to have your photos all in one place. The program works with JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files and is compatible with most digital cameras; it detects your USB driver and imports pictures into albums. Editing tools include cropping (standard or custom), removal of red-eye, and enhancing–even switching from color to black and white. Create slide shows set to your MP3s.
Ever needed to see what's going on on the screen down to the pixel level? That's where the Magnifier comes in. Simple and easy to use, the Magnifier is always handy for when you need to see all the details. Perfect for visually impared or those with partial sight. handy for presentations or tutorials.
Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
FastStone Photo Resizer is a free image converter and resizer intended to enable users (especially digital-camera owners) to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text, and watermarks to images in a quick-and-easy batch mode. The application supports major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, and PNG. Drag-and-drop mouse operation is well supported.
Serif Drawplus 4.0 offers impressive vector drawing tools and fabulous photo effects when you download the DrawPlus Starter Edition. This version is 100% free. It is easy to use, great for designing web graphics and creative print projects, professional logos and comes with comprehensive 'How To' guides.
A vast library of FREE Microsoft images, clipart and Powerpoint templates.
High quality FREE collections of clipart which are ideal for Powerpoint presentations and handouts.
Music is a wonderful resource in lessons. BeeMP3 is a music search engine for locating an mp3-audio files over the Internet. The site boasts 800 000 mp3 files available for download with 10 000 files added daily. Use an audio converter (see link from DVDVideosoft) to turn MP3s into Windows 'WAV' files which Powerpoint accepts without issue. Audacity also provides an Mp3 to WAV conversion.
This is a simple tool to extract the audio from a video file (e.g. from youtube clips, DVD/video files, etc). Enables you to record background music, commentaries, live music performance, acting sequences etc). Simply add video files through a traditional browse dialog box. Choosing an output option is as easy as pressing a radio button. The output is limited to the big three in audio: MP3, WAV, and AC3. Bit rates, sample rate, and channels are easily selected from handy pull-down menus.
Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is ideal for cropping audion files for Powerpoint insertion, converting audion cassettes into PC files and for recortding voice-overs using a plugin microphone. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
iPadio allows you to broadcast from any phone to the Internet live. You can record lecturers, critiques, personal reflections, discussions or debates (limited time allowance) and upload these to your iPadio site, social network sites and/or VLE. You need to open an account first, and you will pay for the phone messaging, but free if your school or College opens an account for you!
Audioboo is a web-based digital sound archive that enables you to record and upload sound files onto a personal web space. You can use audioboo to upload and store impromptu interviews, ambience sound, music you have made yourself, a record of personal reflections and even a full radio show. Comes with its own App and can be accessed via iPhone and Android devices. Some have described this as facebook with sound!
Puzzlemaker is a puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents. Create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more-using your own word lists.
Tarsia is an editor that was originally designed for Maths teachers and enables you to create, print, save and share jigsaw-style and dominoes activities. It includes a powerful equation editor for building complex mathematical expressions.
Blockbuster Vocabulary Games
Are you into dinosaurs? Are you an arty smarty or a science whizz? Choose your favourite topic from these pages and have fun!You'll find games to play, stories to read, ideas for stuff to do at home and the best web links around.Everything on the site is from museums and galleries in the UK.
'Hexagon' Thinking
If you are familiar with using the SOLO taxonomy for writing learning outcomes, which essentially examines students' thinking development, from factual recall to making connections to evaluation, 'hexagon' thinking is an activity that uses the students' current understanding of subject vocabulary and pushes it to the next level. Hexagons can be instantly created using this simple tool at www.pamhook.com.
Create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically and in real time. SurveyMonkey provides free online questionnaire and survey tools.
These timers are perfect for powerpoint presentations. Use 1, 5, 10, 15, 30, and 60 minute timers for lesson activities and games. Timers can be downloaded from the home landing page by clicking here.
Slideshare offers users the ability to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios.
Prezi is a web-based presentation application and storytelling tool that uses a single canvas instead of traditional slides. Text, images, videos and other presentation objects are placed on the infinite canvas and grouped together in frames. The canvas allows users to create non-linear presentations, where users can zoom in and out of a visual map.
Animoto is software that can turn your photos and video clips into professional slideshows. Animoto synchs with facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket. Add text, music and images with a touch of a button.
A fantastic centre for presentations, public speaking and Powerpoint. You can download hundreds of FREE Powerpoint templates.
A bountiful library of FREE Powerpoint templates. Choose from Business, Finance, Abstract, Nature and Travel templates as well as a massive range of general themes.
Another vast library of FREE Powerpoint templates, flash tutorials, music and other tools for the savvy presenter. Also FREE word, excel and publisher templates.
Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.
Videojug is a vocational teacher's dream! With over 60,000 free, professionally-produced 'how to' videos and guides, it offers students online demonstrations of essential practical techniques and a medium through which such techniques can be evaluated and critiqued. Note: Videos are mostly US-based and come with adverts and thick American accents.
TeacherTube officially launched on March 6, 2007. It is an online community for sharing instructional videos and is aimed at teachers and educators at all levels. It is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a new concept or skill. There is also a significant focus on teacher professional development.
Video Conversion & Editing
YouTube-mp3.org is the easiest online service for converting videos to mp3. You do not need an account, the only thing you need is a YouTube URL. As soon as you have submitted it, you will be able to download the converted file.
Available in BASIC and PRO versions, this is a professional and easy way to extract, edit and convert youtube clips. Edits video and audio file formats. Able to convert files for display on iphones and other portable devices.
Software that you must purchase to edit and produce videos and audio with the ability to record what happens on your monitor.
A free conversion tool that takes windows media video formats (WMV) and converts these to a MP3 file.
DVD Authoring & Decryption
A simple tool for decoding and converting DVD films into PC-ready file formats. After this, you need a video-editing tool to view, edit and convert the files into resources that you can view in Powerpoint or Windows Media Player.
Study Tools
Harvard Generator is a free tool that allows you to quickly and easily format references and sources in the correct Harvard Referencing Format.