In no particular order, here’s a list of a few software and freeware packages that teachers who use technology have found useful. Feel free to add to the list:
- Moodle (http://moodle.org) is a free courseware package that can be used in lieu of Blackboard to deliver your whole course. Fans of Moodle praise the way that it’s organized from the ground up into learning units, rather than by tools the way that Blackboard is.
- Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) is a free audio file editing tool. You can use it to edit podcasts or other audio clips, change sound file formats, or record podcasts with a microphone at your computer. It uses a visual-based cut/copy/paste format to allow you to manipulate your sound files efficiently just like the professionals do.
- Profcast (http://www.profcast.com/public/index.php) is a tool that allows you to record and edit presentations and to synchronize PowerPoint presentations with sound files. It’s moderately priced at $29.99.
- EVE2 (http://www.canexus.com) is a plagiarism detection program. You feed it a student paper file, and it checks the file against databases of paper mill papers and online documents, then generates a report that estimates the percent of the document that may have been plagiarized. The report includes links to all the on-line sources that contain similar material to the student paper, so you can confirm for yourself. Also 29.99.
- Turnitin (http://www.turnitin.com) is a plagiarism detection service that can also function as a digital drop box. Instructors and/or students submit papers electronically to a “course” that the instructor sets up, and the service automatically checks the submitted papers against a database of paper mill papers and other submitted papers. KBCC has a turnitin account; contact the KCATT for information on how to get set up to use Turnitin.
- Adobe Captivate 3 [http://www.adobe.landingpage1.com/captivate/cptv/?sdid=BAZOI] enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, assessments and scenario-based tutorials without programming or multimedia skills. Based on the industry-leading Adobe Flash® platform, Adobe Captivate 3 automatically generates interactive content for easy online distribution and access. Using the simple point-and-click user interface and automated features of Adobe Captivate 3, learning professionals, educators, and business users can easily record onscreen actions, add eLearning interactions and include rich media.
- Blackboard Scholar® is a social bookmarking service customized for education. It provides an exciting new way for students and instructors to find educationally valuable resources on the Web. Using the knowledge and power of our network of educational users, Scholar will make it easier for instructors and students to find relevant resources on the Internet for courses and research. Furthermore, by storing and sharing associated information with each resource such as tags, disciplines, other users who have tagged and more, Scholar will allow users to evaluate the resources and find the most relevant and reliable. And it is directly integrated within the Blackboard Learning System(TM) – Enterprise, Vista, and CE Licenses, providing easy access right within the course environment.
- SafeAssign™ is a plagiarism prevention service, offered by Blackboard to its Blackboard Learning System Enterprise, Vista Enterprise and CE Enterprise clients. This service helps educators prevent plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers. In addition to acting as a plagiarism deterrent, it also has features designed to aid in educating students about plagiarism and importance of proper attribution of any borrowed content. SafeAssign is available for Blackboard enterprise clients at no additional cost.
- http://www.wiki-site.com is a free Wiki site that allows you to open and manage a free wiki site with the same site engine of Wikipedia – Free. The wiki allows you to create personal and group pages using the WYSIWYG editor, whicht will produce Wikitext, not HTML. This feature ensures that the content created using WYSIWYG can also be edited in a simple textarea by those who prefer Wikitext.
- The KEEP Toolkit is a set of web-based tools that help teachers, students and institutions quickly create compact and engaging knowledge representations on the Web. With the KEEP Toolkit you can select and organize teaching and learning materials, prompt analysis and reflection by using templates, transform materials and reflections into visually appealing and intellectually engaging representations, share ideas for peer-review, assessment, and collective knowledge building, and simplify the technical tasks and facilitate knowledge exchange and dissemination.
- VoiceThread.com is a online tool that let’s you easily produce collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or phone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). You can also share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too. VoiceThreads can even be embedded on web sites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs as archival movies.
- http://sourceforge.net is the ultimate search engine for open source software.