Mind Mapping

Webspriation is a great visual thinking tool. If you are familiar with Inspiration, you'll know where the name originates. There are many names for this: concept mapping, mind maps, idea webs. Whatever you want to call it, visual thinking clarifies thinking and is another way of organizing ideas.

Perhaps the best thing about this (besides the fact that it is currently free) is that it is housed online so allows the user to set up collaboration groups.

What a great tool for collaboration with groups in different schools! Here is a sample of a collaboration amongst our 10 buildings to create the 'backbone' of our 'shared folders' section.
It will be too small to see here, but click on it and it will enlarge.

Hot Potatoes

No, this is not about cooking, but about a really cool FREE program for Windows, Macintosh, Linux systems. The original software company was called "half-baked software!"

(download program - Freeware as of Sept.1, 2009)
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
Make quizzes, matching, crosswords, and more.
Also has a link to great Language Teaching Clipart to use with the exercises.

Some student made samples:
Animal Match (made by older students for younger children)
Dinosaur Quiz
Aquatic Life Crossword

Slide Shows

There are many slide show programs available on the web. We will here feature two which you can upload to your own server space.

Both require that you download a simple application for creating the slide show.

PhotoOnWeb [Windows 98 / 2000 / XP / Vista]
is a free program by VSO-Software, France (www.vso-software.fr). The software is a useful tool for creating web photo albums meant for Windows operated computers. It supports different photo formats (such as jpg, tiff, raw, gif, bmp, png and dng) and offers several templates (see examples at http://www.photoonweb.com/en/templates.php) to make a photo web gallery in a simple way.

PhotoOnWeb includes a built-in FTP client – to share a web album one can publish it on a free VSO account (first register for free at http://www.photoonweb.com/en/register.php - free space storage limit = 20 Mb) or send it straight onto a personal webpage server.

PhotoOnWeb download page: http://www.photoonweb.com/en/download.php
This cool tool was suggested by Aleksandra Blalteberg. See one of her galleries of Gdansk.

Gallerie - Macintosh OS X only
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/galerie.htm
Quick media gallery web pages.
Also download templates.
Here is a sample of a gallery using the Spring template.