XMind - Social Brainstorming

You know the old standard brainstorming charts that your students having been making since 4th grade? You know what I'm talking about, the one is the big oval/brain looking thing with a bunch of lines coming off of it. Yeah, now you remember. Anyways, that's so 4th grade ago. XMind is an open source, and yes that means free, program that makes brainstorming fun. Go ahead, call it brainstorming 2.0.

According to their website, using XMind/XMind Pro with XMind.net's sharing service is a revolutionary way to enable both team brainstorming and personal mind mapping. With this major upgrade, we bring Web 2.0 concepts on community sharing into a popular desktop application.

The best part about this is that they have it for all platforms, Windows, Mac, Linux, and even a pack-and-go for your usb! (which is my favorite things are in the world now a days!)

WayBackMachine

Do you ever wonder what Google looked like, lets say 7 years ago? Can that simple but distinctive logo and white background really change that much...click here for the answer! Magic? No, it's WayBackMachine.com unbelievable archieve of sites! WayBackMachine lets you browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. All you have to do to start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.

So tell your kids that yes, the internet is still new technology and show how it has progressed so much through each month, year, etc. and there was no facebook or myspace then...they might think that's why the internet was created for.

Splashup

So there are a bunch of programs that try to big Photoshop, but there has not been one that has fulfilled the full capabilities...well maybe gimp does, but you have install that onto your computer. What about if your at school and you can't download and install software onto your computer? Well Splashup is to your rescue!

Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photosharing sites such as flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, photobucket, and facebook to name a few, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress. So go ahead and try it out and see what you do!