Engageme

The Le@rning Federation develops free online curriculum content for all Australian and New Zealand schools and last month released a paper: Multimedia Tools and Applications using Digital Resources.

This is a great directory featuring an A-Z list of possible multimedia creation tools that allow the importation and customization of digital resources.  There’s many free, open source, applications and then a range of others for purchase.  

I’ve examined many of these and quite a few meet my 4 F’s (for tools to use with young people in particular)… Free, Fast, Fun and Flippin Easy!

CamStudio and FreeScreen Recorder are open source free video streaming software programs that allow you to record screen and audio activity and create AVI video files.  These are great tools for making how-to demonstrations and digital stories.  

With the CD Brochure Builder you can simply drag and drop your content files to create your own multimedia CD information resource that will display your content in the sequence you require. The program design and operation are very simple and absolutely no programming is required.  Scroll half-way down the page! 

Comics, picture albums and how-to’s are just some of the applications available in Comic Life – which has a 30 day free download – long enough for some fun lessons! Pictures, speech balloons and captions can be dragged and even web cams can be used…

PhotoStory is a good old favourite that allows users to capture movies, create slideshows with photos, add special effects, sound tracks and narration and save all of this in small files.  It’s a free download through Microsoft. 

VoiceThread allows users - using microphones or phones - to make annotations and comments about photos.  This is a very user-friendly application, with very simple steps to follow, although you might need it hit ‘refresh’ when you first arrive due to some problems with old cookies.

Hot Potatoes is free of charge for those working for publicly-funded non-profit-making educational institutions.  The suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and cloze exercises.

Quia is similar in that it also allows you to create educational web pages, games or tests – immediately accessible.

Descriptions of all learning objects released to date are available in the following catalogues. Some catalogues also list samples from our digital resources and collections ranges.

Happy exploring!