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.

Powerbullet Easy Flash Presentations

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

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).

Flickr

Flickr is a great site for posting, sharing, and tagging your photos. The free version is limited in uploading, but if you pay $25 a year, you get unlimited space and upload bandwidth. Cool. You can see an example of mine here.

Tool Categories:Art/Design/Photos

Audience: Educators/Librarians/Students

How It Works: Upload your photos, artwork, or images to the site. Then organize into sets, slideshows, and add individualized tags to your photos so you can find them easily later on.

Uses: Use as a presentation tool (slideshows), to present classwork/art/photos, to share photos of an event, create an ongoing photo essay, documentary, etc.

Why Use It? Can restrict access to only certain users.