Lulu Self-Publishing

Amazingly FREE self-publishing site. People order your book and it is printed on demand, making it extremely low-cost for you.

Tool Categories: Publishing

Audience: Librarians/Educators/Students

How It Works: You write, design, and upload your book to their site, where it is converted into a PDF file. You maintain control of all aspects of the book. Once it is uploaded, an initial copy needs to be printed, for you to check your changes, etc. Once that’s done, you can make it available to the public, via the Lulu website, which has a very similar feel to Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. As people order the book, it is printed and shipped. There are no huge overhead or printing costs. The people ordering your book are the ones paying for printing–which is built into the price of the book itself. If you want an ISBN you pay $35. If you want to be listed on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, you pay $135, otherwise, there is no cost to create the book. You can also create CD’s and DVD’s to sell here.

Uses: Publish class anthologies, teacher workbooks, books to accompany training, and pretty much any kind of book or audio/video product you want.

Why Use It? It’s extremely low-cost, very professional product, and allows you to collect your student’s work for them, their parents, and other venues. Makes it possible to publish professional books that would otherwise be very difficult to find a publisher for, if there isn’t a large audience for the book.

ArtRage

Alternative to MS Paint—much much better as far as the look of the brushstrokes. Can use various canvases, make backgrounds, cartoons, paintings, etc. Insert these into presentations, etc. You can download the application for free from here.

Tool Categories:Art & Design/Photos & Images

Audience: Educators/Librarians/Students

How It Works: Download the small application to your computer (if you’re downloading to school or work computers, you need permission from the IT dept.) Install the application and begin using it. The interface is extremely easy to use, with help on the home site, if needed. You can save the images as jpeg files and manipulate in photoshop or other photo editing programs.

Uses: Create digital paintings, backgrounds for digital presentations, original artwork, image collages, original designs/icons/logos for web pages, etc.

Why Use It? More creative than using stock images or clip-art. Personalizes presentations. Encourages creativity. Multiple ways to modify, since they are digital files. Allows an artist to practice a particular painting idea, without wasting paint and canvas–to get an idea of the vision they have.

Del.icio.us

Bookmark all your favorite sites and categorize them as you like—search others bookmarks via tags, read RSS feeds of various tags to get most updated sites people are bookmarking, share your bookmarks with others.  See my  version here.

 

Three Collaborative & Organizational Tools

Three web-based organizational tools you may be interested in:

Writeboard: An online word-processing program. Saves all changes and revisions for your review.

Backpack Online Organizer: Plan projects together in a web-based application.

Ta Da To Do Lists: Online to do lists, you can share or keep private.

Powerbullet Easy Flash Presentations

Powerbullet is an open-source application that can substitute for PowerPoint. Uses flash animations.

Audacity Sound Recorder

Free, open-source application that allows you to record and edit multiple audio tracks. Useful for podcasting.

WINK Tutorial and Presentation Creation Software

This is a free, open-source application which is more complex, but you can use it to create tutorials for using software—such as ppt—for professional development purposes, or have kids make tutorials for various online resources

Scrapblog

Scrapblog is just what it sounds like. An online version of a scrapbook where you can design artistic pages for your photos and share your events through an online forum. You can protect this site from the public seeing it by only inviting certain people to view it. You can also import photos from Flickr (though it was giving me a problem today).

Google Calendar

Keep your calendar online and access it from anywhere with Google Calendar.

Share your important dates, keep track of birthdays with reminders, add holidays from around the world, send out invites to special events. Use as a class calendar. Share info with parents, teachers, etc. You can add this to your blog as well.

Boxnet

Want to store your files online? You can access them from any computer connected to the Internet through your Boxnet account. Use as a back-up to your computer. Save large files.