Authoring tools and free web applications

CONTENTS

• Authoring Tools
• Special Needs Teaching Tools
• To make / share presentations
• To draw, color, build and share. Online whiteboards
• To practice languages
• To correct and self-correct
• Identifiers language and translation
• To create and manage a website
• For the development of wikis
• To add images to your website or blog
• To use videos on your site or in your classes / create videotutoriales
• To give voice to your site
• To house and / or share files (pictures, presentations, audio, video, PDF ...)
• Other tools

Authoring Tools

This section contains a list of free tools that allow you to create exercises, activities or other educational content down a program to your computer.

• Ardora is a software application that can create more than 34 types of activities (crossword puzzles, word searches, graphics boards, clocks, etc.). Html easily. Burning is multiligüe, Idoma menu you can choose between Galician, Catalan, Euskera, Spanish, Portuguese (PT), Portuguese (BR), English, Aragonese, Russian, and Romanian Asturian.
• Atenex (Department of Education, Junta de Extremadura). Platform for creating and managing interactive multimedia materials for monitoring and evaluating the learning process. Atenex is an editor that lets you build interactive learning units easily by drag and drop process. The teacher can simply drag the elements you need to go to the screen for creating your own course, also has some administrators through which you can import images, audios, videos and animations. Atenex Builder includes a library of pre-designed templates and interactive games, targeted at different areas of the educational levels of Infant, Primary, Secondary, Special Education and teaching of languages.
• Cuadernia. T ools that the Ministry of Education and Science of Castilla-La Mancha offers the entire school community for the creation and dissemination of digital educational materials. This is an easy and functional tool that allows us to create a dynamic and visual "digital books" which may contain information and multimedia activities for distribution through a web browser, therefore operating system independent. It has also an online version that can work from the internet without having to install the tool on your computer.
• Hot Potatoes. A program that can create 6 types of exercises (multiple choice, organization, association, gap-filling ...) accompanied by feedback and integrating audio and video. In the portal EducaMadrid find an extensive list of activities undertaken with this tool. European activities in the Hot Potatoes blog.
• Edilim. An environment for creating educational programs requiring only a few files off the computer. Allows you to create books (files) and interactive activities (pages) the type puzzles, puzzles ... or descriptive pages. Besides educational activities, develop Edilim allows presentations or interactive books. Library Edilim activities undertaken.
• eXe eLearning. tool for the design, editing and development of educational content that allows publishing on the Internet and import into LMS platforms, for example, Moodle. It is a user friendly tool for creating content with a design attractive site. It was developed in the Python programming language and works with the Firefox browser. Note that a free resource is licensed and is not necessary to be connected to the Internet to work with. Tutorial in Spanish. Read more.
• JClic. Environment for the creation, implementation and evaluation of educational activities, developed in Java. JClic is a set of computer applications that are for various types of activities: puzzles, associations, text exercises, crosswords ... The activities often occur in projects (all activities) and a sequence. Download. Collection of activities with JClic on this blog.
• Lams. Tool to build, manage and deliver online collaborative learning activities. The system is designed for teachers and educators can design learning activities aimed at an entire group. Through a management screen activity is possible to see how far each student has reached in the sequence of activities that constitute the unit and knowing what difficulties arise or how they're doing. Download.
• Malted (CNICE) is an authoring system that allows the creation of multimedia activities and courses for language teaching. The system generates java applets that can be run later from both computer's hard disk or through the websites in which they were published, namely, online. To learn more about the possibilities of this tool, you can read this article published in Sonia Martinez Meadowlark Quaderns Digitals.
• Myscrapbook. Free software that generates virtual books in which pages can be passed as if it were a physical book, as this book made by students of ESO del IES Cavaleri. More. Download.
• PHPWebQuest. Free software developed by Antonio Early that allows the creation of such activities "webquest" without the need for programming skills. If you're interested, you can visit a directory of activities undertaken with this tool.
• Rayuela (IC). Tool created by the Instituto Cervantes, conceived as a support for language teachers. It has 21 interactive programs or hobbies to generate exercises (hangman, crosswords, logic game, multiple choice, link lists, fill in gaps, puzzles, horse jumping, puzzle, true / false ...). Besides these programs, the application includes an HTML editor to publish, both on a local network or on the Internet, complete learning activities that integrate hypertext and multimedia elements, see examples.
• Squeak. Authoring tool for developing multimedia content without any programming knowledge. Squeak allows teaching units include content in text, video, sound, music, 2D and 3D graphics, etc.. This application allows elaborate presentations, including animations and handle all types of video and audio files. It is inspired by constructivist ideas of the LOGO programming language and can produce drawings without having to use other tools. You'll find comprehensive information about this tool and access to download from Squeakpolis (Expremadura Board).
• Win-ABC. Education Program consisting of a large number of activities to work the instrumental techniques and math literate. It has tools and configuration options to customize the program and adapt to the characteristics and needs of each child / a. Currently the program is presented in Castilian, Catalan, English and Basque. The new version allows, among other things, introduce words and associate with your image and associate letters with sounds and pictures, use either the keyboard or mouse, put images and sound to numbers to facilitate their learning, develop stories from files sentence type, for learning or working with literacy problems to add, subtract, multiply or divide. download.

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Teaching tools for special needs (SEN)

• TiCN. Catalog ICT solutions for students with special needs educational support. Views on the blog: technology and diversity.
• Tools to Help Disabled Foundation (HETAH). From this page you can download various learning support programs for people with auditory, visual, motor, etc..

Tools to make or share presentations online

List of sites for free hosting presentations in this section.

• SlideShare and SlideBoom support hosting and sharing pre sentations (PowerPoint, Impress) and inclusion in a web. The files can be viewed on any computer even with no Powerpoint program. SlideBoom can host and share presentations retaining the audio, transitions, animations and links in the presentation.
• AutorSTREAM. PowerPoint presentation sharing tool in blogs, iPod or YouTube.
• Empressr also host and share presentations on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Wordpress, etc..
• PreZentit. Allows you to create online presentations to share or download in HTML format.
• Tar Heel Reader. It is a tool for creating books such as "picture books", ideal for the development of materials for those starting out or have difficulties with reading. It allows the download of books on PowerPoint, Impress or flash. More information and examples on the blog: Educational Technology.
• Powerbullet Presenter allows easily create presentations in flash format.
• VCASMO. To create, edit and share interactive multimedia presentations. See in detail the features.
• Zoho Show. Online tool to make, edit and share multimedia presentations. View features.
• Google Docs has a specific tool for creating and editing presentations (Google Presentations). Among other things, allows you to upload PowerPoint presentations and save presentations in HTML format, for viewing offline. See how Google Docs export presentations to PowerPoint on the blog Reflections on e-learning.
• Scrapblog is a very complete and easy tool for combining various types of multimedia elements to create a simple presentation or a poster. They may include own photos, images and videos, choose background music funds and determine the transitions between slides, add decorative elements to their creations, including text in form of banners or text bubbles to your photos, edit photos (cropped, edit, apply effects ...) and much more. The result can be downloaded to your computer as a JPG file, included in a website or can be viewed online.
• 280 Slides. Free application for creating and editing online multimedia (text, video, images ...). Enables the creation of presentations from scratch or import your own presentations (PowerPoint, etc.). For its online edition. The resulting presentations can be exported to various formats (including PowerPoint) and stored on the computer itself, stored on your server, mailed and insert them into a website. It offers the possibility to use own videos and images or search services like YouTube or Flickr. To save the presentations have to register (action seen on the blog of Martin Nunez Calleja: Bending of Tic).
• Prezi applies is a flash-based online training with presentations that can be very dynamic and nonlinear as it allows panning and zooming visual diagrams and maps that contain links. pictures, videos, words, etc.. The free version lets you import pictures, videos, flash and PDF, to share pesentación (100MB), insert it into a website or blog and download it for presentation without requiring internet connection but instead bears the logo of Prezi.

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Teaching tools for drawing, coloring, build and share. Online whiteboards

• Tools online at NEA (Department of Education and Science of the Principality of Asturias). Online tools with which they can draw freehand, drawing shapes, coloring, make a graffiti-like structures and building lego.
• Twiddle. Pizarra digital online easy, intuitive use with which you can work collaboratively in real time. Among other things, enables a user group painting, coloring, surf the Internet, solve math, chat, send voice messages, or invite users to add photos. This is a free application, can also be used without registration. More information at Engadget
• Blackboard paint and color online. Lets you choose between different tools for free drawing or coloring templates and then print the result.
• FlashPaint is a simple online tool that provides brushes, pens, lines, colors and shapes to make pictures that can be saved in the gallery on the same page or download to your computer. No registration is required.
• Online coloring pages. Easy online drawing application whose results can be sent.
• WebCanvas is a place where people can collaboratively make drawings using various drawing tools. Registration required and registration is free.
• Queeky allows drawings online using various tools (pencils, forms ...). The drawings can also be performed collaboratively. You can save images in the gallery and displayed on a website.
• Scriblink is a line that allows pizarrra work collaboratively. With it can be done freehand, using mathematical symbols and forms, working on grid color, write text and insert images stored on your computer or the Internet. It has an equation editor and various communication tools to facilitate collaborative work. The result can be printed, saved (after registration) or sent via email,
• Fooplot is a tool that lets you draw graphs of mathematical functions and save them in PDF or PNG.
• Kerpoof child is a platform with this drawing tool with which children can make their creations and then print, share or save. To save registration is required.
• Sketchcast is a tool that allows publibosquejos, ie collecting Minivideos with or without the process of moving speech by a drawing. The publibosquejos may be published on a blog.
• ArtPad allows drawings simulating a canvas and brush. The result can be printed, saved to a gallery of pictures of the site or send via email.

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Teaching tools for editing and self-correct

• Stylus is an interesting interactive online tool correction. Lets you type or paste a text and check online if it contains any error. It also provides a correction report and has several interactive tools to provide explanations and answer questions.
• Xuxen is an online tool to detect and correct texts written in Euskera. The system offers two modes of correction: a rapid correction in which the tool highlights the unfamiliar words and displays a list of suggestions for each, and a Advanced correction in the correction is performed word by word. Xuxen also offers the possibility to register and manage a custom dictionary. The registered user may be generating the dictionary while editing their texts. Thus, the new terms stored in the custom dictionary will be considered in future correction.

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Online tools to learn and practice languages

• Forvo is a collaborative site that collects words spoken by native speakers in over 200 languages. It is intended as a tool to practice and improve pronunciation. (Source: The blog of ICT-IES Albalat).
• Talk Spanish (BBC-Languages). Minivideos with activities to learn to express themselves orally in Spanish in basic situations. Among the topics of the videos are: greetings, presentation of the family and oneself, to speak of the age, buying food, order food, ask for directions, talking about work ...
• Dreams (BBC). Minivideos showing everyday situations in various Spanish speaking countries, such as visiting Trujillo. You can also access the transcripts of the dialogues and these audio formats.
• Selingua (Marianne Wartoft). Free application for downloading to your computer to play games involving vocabulary and grammatical twists. Some of the games it contains are the "Hangman", a game guessing the correct word among four possible, connect another ten words with a translation and others as "Time", where you must click on the word between 25 possible correct before it changes the other. The application comes with built-in dictionaries than 2000 words each in English (American and British), German, Spanish, French and Swedish. In addition, users can add words to dictionaries.
• SubInglés: Learning English with song subtitles. This site contains over a thousand videos with songs in English subtitles that can be searched by title or by the interpreter. It also has financial hole and songs related with the transcripts of the letters.

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Identifiers language and translation

• SILC (Système d'Identification de la langue et du Codage) is an application that automatically detects the language in which it is written. Simply type or paste in a text box that you want to identify (at least two words for identification to be effective). The application recognizes more than 30 languages.
• Xerox Language Identifier is another application for the detection of language in written texts. You need at least a five-word sentence. Recognizes 47 languages.
• TextCat Language Guesser is another automatic language identifier in written texts. Recognizes about 69 different languages.
• BabelXL Identifies the language in which you are writing a text and can translate it online with more than 50 languages. The length of the text to type or paste is unlimited.

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Tools for creating and managing a website

• Blog. Tool management and publishing content on the internet that allows for quick and easy way, writing articles, show videos and pictures, store and share information, categorize links, etc.. If you are thinking about creating a blog, in Aulablog find out how. Blogger and Wordpress blogs are two managers with which you can create a blog in minutes to share your activities, to propose new activities, exchange information with your students or colleagues, to complement your classes, etc.. You can see also: Create and configure a Wordpress blog.
• Blogsome allows the creation of a blog in seconds.
• Tumblr is a system for creating, managing and hosting microblogs.
• Weebly allows the creation of websites and blogs without having any programming knowledge by selecting a template and further customization. Includes free hosting. See demo.
• Infogami is a platform that allows you to easily create custom Web pages with professional appearance. Includes lodging, detailed statistics and a blog site.

Tools for the development of wikis

• Wikispaces. See the presentation "Wikispaces for teachers" in Aulablog21.
• Bluwiki allows the creation and hosting of wikis.
• Kerik wikis allows the creation of graphics. More information on the blog edutics-educational technologies.
• MediaWiki. Free software for the development of wikis.

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Tools to put voice to your website or blog

• Audacity is a multi-platform recording and editing sounds, versatile, easy to use, free and open source use.
• Sonowebs and VozMe are two online tools that give voice to any written text on a website or blog. They are based on the automatic creation of MP3 sound file from the text that you provide, so that whoever visits your site can hear the text read well.
• Yakitome is a text to speech converter with the advantage that the conversions are available at our own library, allowing us to download or the ability to share (Source: Engadget).
• Snapvine is a Web application that enables voice blogging, by ensuring the recording by phone, giving us a number depending on our country, and a time code, or through our microphone. To post to share the voice of our blog, we can add your widget on our website or any social network profile (Source: Engadget).
• Wildvoice. Tool for recording online that can be shared and inserted into a blog. More information on the blog: Educational Technology.

Tools to add images to your website or blog

• Super Screenshot. Allows capture entire web pages and select the size and format (JPEG or PNG) of the final image.
• Websnapr2.0. Make captures of websites in miniature.
• Kwout. Capture image of websites that offers the particularity to keep the links active in the captured image.
• Gickr lets you create GIF animations from images or videos from YouTube and insert them into a website or blog.
• Smilebox lets you create image galleries, add text, music, transition effects and backgrounds, and print them, inserting them into a blog, send mail or save them.

Tools to put videos on your website or blog, for use in your classes and create videotutoriales

• Vquence is an online tool that allows you to make videos a from fragments of other videos and share them.
• Splicd offers the ability to cut video from YouTube and share the selected fragments.
• Screencast-o-Matic. Lets make a video online that records our activity on the desktop (screencast) for use in conducting tutorials. The video can be stored on your web or export it in Quicktime format. More information on the blog: LaMateporunYogur.
• Overstream. Captioning tool for video online.
• Extract YouTube. A tool that can extract and download videos from Youtube.
• ConverTube. Tool download videos from Internet and convert them to other formats.
• ExtractYouTube is a tool that allows you to search, view and download YouTube videos in flv format. More tools related to Youtube on the blog Engadget.
• Shiki is a free tool that allows to download videos from Internet and converting to different formats (MP3, MP4, AVI, WMV ...).
• Convert Direct ConvertmyTube and Vixy are other converters online YouTube videos to other formats (MP3, MP4, DivX, etc.). To save them to a PC, iPod, PSP, etc.. Such tools can save facilitates the full videos or audio only to play them later without an Internet connection.
• Hellodeo. Very simple and free tool that allows recording of videos online to share and add on a blog. More information and an example on the blog Technological Education.
• Zentation. Online tool for combining and synchronizing video presentations.
• Wink is a free program, initially designed for creating videotutoriales. Can capture the activity of the computer screen or use images in various formats and add captions, explanatory texts, buttons, symbols ... allows various output formats. See an example.

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Tools for hosting or sharing files (images, presentations, audio, video, PDF ...)

All types of files

• Oneeke. With this online application you can share your computer screen and talk on Skype without the other or others having to install anything on your computer. More info and a tutorial in Spanish on Online Tech Tips blog.
• Adrive. Provides 50 GB of free space for file hosting.
• Ziddu. Free unlimited storage for all file types (images, audios. Videos, texts ...). It offers tools for organizing files and can obtain benefits every time someone downloads your files.
• MediaFire is a free service for unlimited file hosting
• FlyUpload offers unlimited free hosting for files up to 2 GB.
• Megaupload. Up to 50 GB of free online storage including file manager
• Conv2PDF can convert many formats to PDF, house them and share them.
• Box.net is a service provided free of charge up to 1 GB of storage for all file types. Uploaded files can be organized into folders and add tags and may create a network of friends to share stored files.
• File dropper. Accommodation of all types of files up to 5 GB in a single click.
• Drop.io is a free service that lets you share files online through a very simple .. More information about this tool on the blog: arturogoga.com

Images

• MusicWebTown offers up to 10 GB of free space for storing files in MP3 format.
• ImageSchack can host pictures in JPG / gif / png / gif / bmp / tif / tiff / swf (up to 1.53 MB) and resize or change resolution.
• Photobucket is another image hosting service.
• PiccDrop is a free image hosting that supports these formats: jpeg / jpg / png / tiff / bmp / gif / ico / icn / svg / pdf / icns / hdi / psd. Up to 6 MB.
• BubbleShare allows host pictures and create albums for online viewing or distribution by electronic mail. It also offers the option to add images or voice written comments on a balloon (as in the comics).

Audio

• Goear
• SoundCloud. Allows host audio files and insert them into a blog. More information on the blog: Educational Technology.

Videos

• YouTube
• Motionbox is a hosting service and publication of videos similar to YouTube that offers the possibility to share the videos with whom they want. It has tools for editing videos, can organize them by tags and users to comment and valued. The videos can be inserted into a website or blog using the code provided.
• Vimeo

Presentations

View: Make / share presentations online

E-books

• Issuu is a free platform that enables hosting and publication of converting PDF documents into e-books. The result can be inserted into a website or blog but do not download. It also functions as a library and makes searching for documents lodged by other users. Registration required.
• Scribd allows hosting, sharing and access documents in many formats: PDF, text, images, spreadsheets, powerpoints, etc.. Besides providing the necessary code to insert our documents on a blog allows you to add labels (tags) for our documents.
• Bubok. Service to publish books online. Allows you to receive a portion of the revenue generated by sales of works. More on Engadget.

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Other Tools & Utilities

• Plugoo is a tool that allows visitors to your website or blog in real time to communicate with you whenever you're offline, also you questions or comments as they browse your website.
• Bancos de recursos gratuitos . Una extensa recopilación de bancos, galerías  y colecciones de sonidos, fotografías, ilustraciones, animaciones, vídeos, iconos y símbolos de uso libre o con licencias Creative Commons para utilizar en tus trabajos y proyectos didácticos o educativos.
• Generadores online de material didáctico . M ás de 130 herramientas gratuitas que permiten crear materiales didácticos (información, ejercicios, actividades, etc.) sin necesidad de tener que bajar un programa a tu ordenador .
• Aplicación para elaborar el horario escolar o escribir las tareas de clase (Junta de Castilla y León). Dirigido a niños, permite elegir una de las dos plantillas, escribir en diferentes colores, arrastrar los textos de una casilla a otra e imprimir el horario.
• Phonetic s (Universidad de Iowa). Sitio en el que se muestra mediante imágenes y animaciones la articulación de cada vocal y consonante en español, alemán e inglés americano. Además, incluye videos y audios que muestran los sonidos en contexto.
• Fuentes tipográficas infantiles . Una variada colección de tipos de letra de aspecto infantil para preparar cuadernillos, cuentos, presentaciones… Sólo tienes que descargar el archivo del tipo de letra que elijas e instalarlo en tu ordenador.
• Programa de cálculo y análisis automático de versificación poética (Mundo Poesía). Una herramienta online que puede ser utilizada para comprobar la habilidad a la hora de medir versos.
• Recopilación de programas educativos para descargar (internenes.com).
• Mathway es una aplicación online de ayuda para las matemáticas. Resuelve problemas de álgebra, trigonometría y cálculo. Se pueden consultar ejemplos o introducir una fórmula para ver el resultado y todo su desarrollo.
• AuthorPoint Lite . Es un conversor de presentaciones PowerPoint a flash. Es gratuito y precisa la descarga del programa.
  
  

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