Cool IT Stuff :
Some links to interesting or just plain cool tools that might come in handy.
Image Stuff:
Pixlr
- a cool, online basic version of Photoshop which makes editing images a bit easier
A guide to producing an image with a transparent background in Pixlr
Flickr - an excellent source of images, although oddly increasingly blocked in schools
Big Huge Labs - does some excellent (and fun!) things with images. Good for speech bubbles and motivational posters...
dafont - wide range of fonts and font types which you can try out - great for creating banner text for example
Morgue File - copyright free images and lots of them
Flash Vortex - cool free flash, which can be just the thing for pimping a web page
Wordle - for making word clouds
Gliffy - for making flow diagrams and the like
Sound Stuff:
Audacity - the most excellent audio editing thing. You'll probably want the Lame encoder as well - it'll have details for that on the website.
Web Stuff:
Survey Monkey - is a cool way of creating your own online surveys. Limited slightly by what you can do with the free version (notably to 10 questions and only 100 responses per survey) but still really rather cool. I have a page of surveys I host for one of our sixth form students.
HighSlide Gallery Tools - very cool ways of creating a neat gallery effect using JavaScript rather than the Apple-killing flash stuff. I've tried this out and it does really work rather well.
Interesting and Useful Stuff:
Zamzar - for all your file conversion and download needs
iSpring Free - converts PowerPoint files into flash movies, which can be useful for all sorts of things, such as putting a whizzy intro thingummy on a web page or just producing a presentation that can be viewed by almost everyone regardless of whether they have PowerPoint...
Web Sites That Suck - because it's cool
QR codes - some stuff here
Some Game Show bits and bobs:
Million Pound Drop - a minor hack of a PowerPoint made by Paul Sturtivant over at the SLN forum which will allow a short million pound drop set of questions to be run. Perhaps as one of those plenary things.
The idea is all Pauls, all I did was tweak it a little and embed the music rather than link it to a file. The music came from You Tube so I guess it must be copyright free as otherwise it wouldn't be on You Tube...
The Powerpoint seems to work in all versions as far as I can tell. The money isn't draggable - although I'm working on that. The sound will play in versions of PowerPoint from 2007 onwards it seems (and it'll play automatically and it should be embedded), including for Macs.
Lesson Planning Stuff:
Someone asked for some lesson planning templates, so here are the 3 TEEP ones that we have on the school network. They aren't exciting and they aren't cool, but you'll never know when I'll need one if Ofsted walks through the door...
Detailed TEEP plan - my gut feeling is that this is far too detailed and lacks space
Circular TEEP plan - my preferred option as it's bound to confuse any inspector and adapts quite well to arced pieces of work which might take more than one session to complete (this is the plan over on the right there...)