Last night I braved the crowds and went late night shopping.
After three hours I’d had enough and went home, with lots of bags and a lot less money! That’s me done for now, but what’s on your Christmas shopping list?
I thought I would give you a few ideas. Not anything to do with gifts for friends and family, just a list of goodies to get you going in your e-learning.
Mind Maps
Try FreeMind, an easy to use piece of software for any sort of planning.
Word Clouds
Check out Wordle which is fantastic if you need to put something different in your presentation or elearning. If you need more persuading check out one of my other posts on it.
Screen Capture
SnagIt is my favourite for capturing screenshots, it also has a very easy to use editing features. SnagIt is available as a 30 day trial download.
Slideshare
Sharing presentations is easy using Slideshare. Create an account and upload your presentations. You can share presentations publicly or privately.
The good news is that all of these are free. Merry Christmas!
John
Tags: Christmas, FreeMind, goodies, Mind Maps, Screen Capture, Slideshare, SnagIt, Word Clouds, Wordle
December 10, 2008 at 11:09 am |
Nice one John.
When it comes to tools you’re the man.
You always seem to come up with great stuff that do clever things and costs zilch.
How about adding this one to your list
XnView is a great, FREE, tool for viewing images. It also allows cropping, resizing, batch renaming, batch converting and lots lots more.
I know that at least one council has adopted this as the default graphics tool.
December 11, 2008 at 8:24 am |
Hello John
I found this list of Top 25 Free Tools every L&D professional should have at their finger tips from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies website.
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/25Tools/index.html
A couple of yours are there by my favourite so far is Jing – online screen and video capturing. Lots of other people like it too, it’s had great reviews.
Janet
December 11, 2008 at 8:26 am |
Guys have you ever used http://www.virtualdub.org – its is a video capture/processing utility that is free (open source). I’ve heard lots about it but not yet used it – what I’ve heard is that its one of the best tools available for compressing video and while it lacks the polish of the commercial products, its pretty good
December 15, 2008 at 3:32 pm |
I’ve heard of it and used it once – converting a file format I think. Fortunately I had access to Sorenson Squeeze which, although it has its problems, I thought was great. To me, and I’m well aware that I’m wearing an M/E (moderator/evaluator) hat, compression is the key. Using the Pro codecs meant we were able to get smaller file sizes for the same quality. On one project I was editing content from Sky then compressing it for web use. Having really good source meant being able to get really good compression. I know it’s a little expensive, but would recommend checking it out – savings also come from less server usage, bandwidth and all the stuff that can add up.