Serendipity35

It's easy - too easy - to assume that our students have all the tech tools they need at home for the Web 2.0 assignments we are giving them. I know that NJIT students have access to a lot of expensive software as part of their tuition package and most colleges do the same. For K-12 students it's not the same. There's probably a pretty general assumption in all but the poorest districts that kids have a computer, Internet, maybe a broadband connection and software like Microsoft Office. Do all your students have PowerPoint and Word? Do some only have Wordpad? Do they have PhotoShop or video editing software?

I think it's a good idea to at least point students to things that are available free and online to make them productive at home.

An easy place to recommend is Google Pack which collects in one place links to Google Earth, Norton Security Scan, Google Desktop, Firefox with Google Toolbar, Adobe Reader, Skype (Internet phonecalls - VoIP), Google Toolbar for IE, Spyware Doctor, Picasa (for photos), Google Photos Screensaver, Google Talk & RealPlayer.

I'm thinking about open source "free to use for as long as you want" software. I don't hear people say freeware and shareware as much these days, though there are still distinctions. I'm lumping together here things that they do not have to pay to use.

You can point them to individual titles or types

• say you want them to use some dialogue concept mapping software (maybe they use a purchased product in school), you could give them a link to compendiuminstitute.org
• or ganttproject.sourceforge.net/
  for project management software (high school students should be using this type of software for group projects)
• or the popular GIMP graphics editing software (Photoshop-like)
• one of several Office Productivity software packages like openoffice.org
• Mind Mapping software at freemind.sourceforge.net

Better yet, is to start bookmarking sites for your students (on your website, blog or using something like del.icio.us) that are reviewing and collecting software for you.

Recently I was turned on to the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies ("Making Sense of E-Learning Trends, Technologies and Tools") by a colleague that was looking at their TOP 100 list and was pleased to see Moodle right there at #16. Not everything there is free (they let you know) but they have several sets of user recommendations.

There are plenty of titles to keep you busy. I'm happy to see that I know almost all of them, but there are a dozen or so that are new to me (like Explode, another social networking community and Scribd, a document hosting and sharing site) and some (like Jaiku, the mini-blog service) that I just don't see as educationally useful for me right now.

They also have categorized pages of links like mind mapping and brainstorming tools.

Their Learning Toolbox page gives you a nice selection of user and producer tool links and information.

Their blogger, Jane Hart, features a tool in each post and I must say that I have not heard of most of them. Does this mean I need to add yet another RSS feed?