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!)

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!

Printable Paper

College ruled, wide ruled, graph, Cornell note, dot, penmanship, columnar, and legal paper. Do you have all these available for your students? Do you even know what half of these are used for? More than likely you don't have these and don't know what half of these are used for. But lets say you need your students to use Cornell note styled paper and your school supply closet doesn't have it. Well guess what, printablepaper.net is to your rescue! Printable Paper has hundreds of papers you can download and print for free. They have graph paper, lined paper, financial paper, music paper, and more. Printable Paper has been featured by LifeHacker, and many other "helpful" sites across the web.

Tube Leecher

Have you ever gone on YouTube and was like...I wish I could show this in my classroom, but those 'darn' internet filters will block it! Then you think, I wish I could download that file, and you search high and low to see if you can the video from YouTube. Afters hours of searching, well hopefully you give up at 5 minutes, you come to the conclusion that it's not possible. But suddenly a great site is found, Tube Leecher!

Tube Leecher lets you plug in the standard http link to the YouTube video and lets you download it directly to your computer. So, you still need to be able to go to YouTube, but not you can download the file at home, and birng it to school. Now the only catch is that you need to download and install flvplayer flash player to open the videos. But you can always convert them so you can play with windows media player. Now I'm not saying this is 100% legal, but if it's public, it's for everyone right?

eCalc - Online Scientific Calculator

Oh the beauty of high school math and the love of the TI83 calculator. But do you have an extra $130 laying around to dish out for it? Well we all know it's nice to have in class, but what about transporting it from school to home and back? eCalc has came out with their own version of the TI83, but hey guess what....it's FREE! (hey that rhymed!) eCalc is a free online calculator that supports many advanced features including unit conversion, equation solving, and even complex-number math. The calculator is designed to work directly in your browser and requires no special plug-ins.

You can even download this thing so you have it directly on your home desktop, well that's if you're running Windows that is. And...get this...hold on to your chair...they have recently came out with a version that goes right on to your flash drive. eCalc compiled eCalc basic calculator into a standalone .exe which allows you to run the calculator from a flash thumb drive, or right from your desktop without requiring any installation. Download Portable Calculator (Standalone exe version) So go crazy and plug and chug those numbers in.

Natural Motion Endorphin

We all know that today's students don't go home, do their homework, practice the piano, help with dinner, clean up, and go to bed. It's more like come home, flip on the Xbox 360, Wii, or PS3 and PWN people online in games. What is there learning going on in those games? I say 100% YES! I myself is a avid video game player, and trust me, you learn a lot in, it might not be on the ACT, but you do learn.

When trying to look for software to try to get my students involved with animation, I found a company called NaturalMotion who created a software called Endorphin. Endorphin is a software that is the industry's first Dynamic Motion Synthesis software. At the heart of endorphin are its Adaptive Behaviors, which - unlike animation data - are completely interactive. With Adaptive Behaviors, 3D characters essentially animate themselves. Move two Football players close to each other and one will automatically tackle the other one, realistically trying to grab hold of his legs and bringing him down . Or not. It really is up to you. endorphin allows animators to direct scenes in real-time in a way they have never been able to do before. You can change parameters or change behaviors and see the results instantly on the screen in front of you. When you're done, export animation data in one of the many formats, ready for use in your game or VFX shot.

The best part Endorphin is that it is FREE for education, and all you have to do is download the software and register it. So go ahead and download it, heck it even comes with free video tutorials on how to make it work! This software is one of a kind, and it's completely free for the education version! How cool is that!

Phun - A 2D physics sandbox!

I know I'm always looking into ways to get my students more involved in learning. The best thing I've found is that students learn the most, when they're having fun! As classes get harder, I've found it's harder to engage students in fun ways...but then I came across a website called Phun.

Phun is a free game like 2D physics sandbox where you can play with physics like never before. The playful synergy of science and art is novel, and makes Phun as educational as it is entertaining. Click below to download PHUN for PHREE!

And if you're not already excited about Phun, just watch this short video!

Task2Gather.com

It's all about timing...right? That's what you tell your students, you remind them, you have 2 weeks left until your project is due, 1 week, 3 days, tomorrow! And you're guessing about 75% of your students wait until that last week or so to start. Well Task2Gather is a great way to keep kids on track! Task2Gather is a free service for online task and project management. Manage all your tasks and projects online with Task2Gather and invite your student's parents, teachers, students, and anybody else to participate in the project. So now Johnny's parents can't say, "We never knew about this project!" Hello McFly! It's been assigned for over 2 weeks! Once again this is all free, you just need a email address!

Jing Project

Have you ever thought...wow I wish I could just record what I'm doing on my computer so I don't have to keep on showing the same thing over...and over...and over again? Well Here you go, the Jing Project has came to your rescue. Jing is a always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video by either download or using screencast.com all from your computer to anywhere. This software is so simple, just download, install and, wham-bam-thank you ma'am, it's ready to go! It even allows you to only capture specific areas of your screen as well as snap shots. So plug in your mic, opps I forgot, it has mic support so it even records what you're saying! And get this program running ASAP. So good bye to the headache of answering the same question over and over and over...just say check out the class Jing! Check out the examples below...

Blog Video Example

CamStudio.org

I teach CAD/Drafting, and it's about 98% on the computer, I've done demonstrations to the entire class, instructing all 27 students at the same time, but what about for the couple knuckleheads that aren't paying attention, or the students that got lost after you said, click on the icon that says SolidWorks. Anyways, I thought how can I have these students catch up without me going to help them because they weren't paying attention. CamStudio has solved this problem, it's a free streaming video software able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

So take your lessons to the next level and make them into something to share with everyone, put it on the network for all teachers to use, heck, if you have a web page or have a blackboard account, make these available to directly stream so students can watch and work at the same time. They are the generation of multitasking right?

GanttProject

I'm always trying to find ways to find new ways to help students stay on task when they are working on a project, especially when they're 2-3 weeks long. GanttProject has came up with a great program that can help students stay on task, in a cool and FREE way! With GanttProject you can break down your project into a tree of tasks and assign human resources that have to work on each task. You can also establish dependencies between tasks, like "this task can't start until this one is finished". GanttProject renders your project using two charts: Gantt chart for tasks and resource load chart for resources. You may print your charts, generate PDF and HTML reports, exchange data with Microsoft(R) Project(TM) and spreadsheet applications.

Adobe Photoshop Express Beta

Photoshop...it's this generations Microsoft Paint, but on steroids. Now most students probably don't have a legit version of Photoshop on their home computer due to it's expensive price, but we can change that. Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop Express, a free lite version of your typical Photoshop. You can edit, tweak, manipulate, color, and pretty much anything else you want to do in this version, plus when you sign up, you get up to 2 gigs of free storage for your photos. This site can also hook right into your students Flickr, Facebook, or their own Adobe photo storage. If your school can't afford the software, well now you have a free version to use, and trust me, it's a whole lot better than MS Paint.

Lego Digital Designer

The amazing world of Legos! They've been around forever, but you probably remember having a big bin of them in the closet that you use to build houses, cars, monsters, etc. But who wants to deal with that mess anymore when you can go digital? That's what the Lego Digital Designer software is all about. It's a simple 3D software, almost like a basic CAD program, that lets you take already made pieces and put them together just as if you were doing it in real life! This is perfect for all grade levels. If particpate in FIRST Lego League, Lego NXT Robotics, or if you're teaching about simple machines using blocks and triangles. The number of things you can do with this software is endless!

This is a 4 min. video that gives you a quick runthrough of what you can do with this software.

Lego also has a Educators Link that provides free lessons and activities. You can actually search activities by grade level, age, and activity. This is great for the busy teacher or a starting point to build a lesson off of.