Alternatives to Adobe Suite CS5

Adobe has announced a new CS5 version of their Creative Suite. Even though educators can get a hefty discount for these applications, there is still a cost. Not only is there a cost, but like so many software programs, the Adobe suite products have become more sophisticated, which is good for professionals, but not helpful for individuals just wanting to complete a simple task. Some of the alternatives suggested below may be more complex (GIMP and Synfig as examples), but the rest offer a much easier path to accomplishing your goals in developing a website or publishing a newsletter than the Adobe CS5 programs. And, more importantly, they are FREE!

The idea behind Photoshop is to manipulate images and improvephotographs, a free alternative is GIMP. This application is about as difficult to master as Photoshop, but it has many of the Photoshop features. If you are simply looking to make some small improvements to a photo, youmay want to consider picnik or splashup(bothfree), but if you want some of the power found in Photoshop, you should look at GIMP.

A graphics editor that’s free and similar to Illustrator andCorelDraw is Inkscape. This application comes with several tutorials to help you learn how to use it, and a wiki where you can share ideas and learn from others. This program is Open Source and provides a well defined menu where you can easily find information about using Inkscape and locate free clip art.

“Synfig is,” in their words, “a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based open-source 2D animation software package, designed fromthe ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can.” It offers a free alternative to Adobe Flash but does not have all the features of Flash, especially the ability to move objects from Illustrator or Photoshop into Flash. It does do a very nice job with animation, and of course, the price is right—it’s free.

>A free, Open Source alternative to Dreamweaver is Nvu webauthoring software. They also offer hosting for a reasonable amount ($4.99/month). This program is a WYSIWYG that complies with W3C’s web standards so you know that your site will comply with their guidelines. This program is easy to use and will help you quickly develop a webpage.

For users of InDesign, or QuarkXpress, there is Scribus. This is a free, Open Source application available for both Mac and PCplatforms. Even though there appears to be no toolbars or palettes they are switched on from the Windows menu. TrustedReviews gives this application high marks (http://bit.ly/9Dnv4r).

Even though I prefer using the Adobe Suite, and now face learning the new elements in CS5, I share these applications that are free and somewhat easier to learn and use. I’m sure that there may be other equally useful programs in the Web 2.0 cloud. Please share them if you like.

You can now make your photos talk. That's right, using an application called fotobabble you can add sound to your images. Go to fotobabble, sign up (remember our favorite word? FREE!), upload your image, record your message, then link it to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or link it in an email or embed it in your webpage.

Here is a sample I did to see how easy it is. Click on the image above to see this sample. One other important feature--no download to your computer is required so it works with both Mac and PC.

This is something you could use in an online or web-supported class to show the class a photo of some relevant object or site that you narrate. And you can use it to send a virtual Mother's Day gift from your children to their grandmother. You can make a talking postcard. There are a lot of uses that you can find for this application.

Do you know that you can edit photos without learning Photoshop? That's right--there is a new Web 2.0 application that will allow you to take a photograph and easily remove wrinkles, blemishes, red-eye and glare with the click of your mouse. You can also add effects and make color adjustments. All this costs, well, you know our favorite word--FREE! You can do all this without downloading the application to your computer.

What is this application you ask, it's CITRIFY (click on the link or go to http://www.citrify.com/). It does come in a Premium version that will cost you $39.99, but the free version does everything you will probably need. Premium CITRIFY will allow work with larger images, is downloadable and provides technical support.

There is now an alternative to PowerPoint Presentations? That's right, Prezi offers a way to do presentations that Harvard Business Review called "Insanely great," and Techcrunch said was the, "coolest online presentation tool I have ever seen."

Prezi is an application that has 3 positive features:

1. It does not require you to download anything to your computer,
2. You can link to any file you create,
3. And my favorite, it's FREE!

This is an application that is easy to learn and can include images and videos in your presentations. You can click here to see a Prezi presentation I made on "Facebook and Twitter for Education." You can also go to http://prezi.com/ and watch the one minute video and look at the other examples.

Give Prezi a try and you might say goodbye to Powerpoint. As always, call if you need help with this or any other application that might help you in the classroom.

Did you know that you can take a PDF file, convert it to a document (either a .doc or .rft) edit it and save it as a PDF?

How many times have you had a PDF file that you wanted to edit and couldn't? Well here is a solution to this situation. You can use PDF to Word. It is a 3 step process:

1. Select the PDF file
2. Choose to convert it to .DOC or .RTF
3. Enter your email address and click Convert
4. Wait for the email
5. Once you receive the email, open the attached document and make your corrections
6. Then save the file as a PDF

No downloading is required and, remember our favorite word, it's FREE.

Have you ever tried to copy part of a webpage and printed a lot of pages you didn't need? Here a way to make any webpage print friendly, and save paper.  Go to

and enter the URL of the page you want to print and it will give you a print preview. Now just select the stuff you don't want printed, delete it, and print what you want.

Save a tree, lower your frustration, get what you ordered--use printfriendly.com.

 

And, like most of our tips, IT'S FREE! 

Adobe.com to find Adobe ConnectNow

Did you know that Adobe has a site where you can create PDF's for free, even if you don't have the Adobe Acrobat software? You can also use Adobe Connect to meet live over the web and share your screen with anyone.

 

That's right, at acrobat.com you can use several of Adobe's applications for free. You may have heard of Adobe Buzzword to share documents, well Adobe has added Adobe ConnectNow, Create PDF, Share (to send files to others), and MyFiles (to store your files online).

 

All you need is a User Name (email) and Password which are, as we always look for, FREE!  Also, if you have one of Adobe's CS4 applications you have the ability to share your screen with others. Look under File>Share My Screen... This will take you to a sign in screen where you log on and then email the person you want to share your screen.

Finding Facebook Connections

Are you aware that there are applications you can use to visually see how your friends network together on Facebook?

 

That's right, for all you visual learners you can see the connections between your friends. Here are a few of the applications that you can use, a description of each from their website, and my comments on them:

• Facebook Visualiser "Visualiser is a tool to graphically explore your facebook social network. You can use it to see how all your contacts are connected to each other, and in the process disclose unknown common friends. Other FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) disclosure would be interesting, but unfortunately, the Facebook API doesn't include this important bit of data."
  COMMENT: Like this one the best. It uses the photos of you friends and draws connecting lines between the ones who are networked. You can make the chart larger or smaller and sort by relationship and gender filters.
  

• Facebook Friend Wheel "Friend Wheel is free and anyone with a Facebook account can see their network of friends linked and represented in this fashion. The rationale is simple: On the outside are all of your friends and if two people are linked together, it means that they are friends with each other. There's also an interactive flash version which allows the nodes to be moved and highlighted, and makes it possible to zoom in and out."
  COMMENT: The most colorful of all the options. Friends are listed around the outside of a circle and lines link connections. The more friends, the harder to differentiate the connections. Created by a 19 year old student with 100 friends.

• Nexus "Nexus is a friend grapher for Facebook built on Graphviz twopi and neato. It calculates friend similarity by parsing profiles (through the Facebook API), and highlights links between friends who share interests and groups. While the generated image is static, browsing the connections is dynamic: clicking a friend node shows who they are friends with, as well as all commonalities with mutual friends."
  COMMENT: Interesting but looks more like a visit to a planetarium in the dark version. You can rollover the dots and you friend's photo appears. A light version can be selected and size can be easily changed.

• Facebook Mutual Friends "Daniel McLaren has built a Facebook friends visualization using his own flash-based graph visualization tool called Constellation. The interface lets you see which of your friends know each other. At any given time it will show one of your friends as the selected node (in bold), and any mutual friends as additional nodes. Lines between nodes represent friendships." 
  COMMENT: Interesting format if you like to see things move about. Click on a friend from the drop down window and that friend's connections will be displayed. Could use a lot of processor energy with a large number of friends.

All of these applications are free and none require a download.

Have a Picnic with Picnik

Previously I have mentioned Adobe's Photoshop Express and Google's Picasa for photo editing. One problem with Picasa is that you need to download the software to your computer and it seems to take over all you digital images. I found this frustrating since I also use Photoshop CS4 for editing and didn't want the Picasa logo on my images. Flickr, a Yahoo application, does not require any download (by the way, neither does Adobe's Photoshop Express) and does a nice job in photo editing. But recently I discovered an application I like better than these three and there is no download required and, like the others, it's a FREE registration. Yea!

 

This application for photo editing that I recently discovered, and really like, is 

Picnik (http://www.picnik.com/). This application will allow you to do the usual editing things like crop, rotate, resize, make color corrections and remove red-eye. But it will also let you do a lot more. For example you can add effects to your photos. Like adding vibrance, vignettes, mattes and making color changes. You can also turn your image into a pencil sketch, increase film grain and posterize them. You can add stickers, text and frames. All these are done with easy clicks of your mouse.

 

Above is an an image I edited with a few mouse clicks using Picnik. The results can be seen in the image below. As you can see, its been cropped, text added and it has been sharpened and posterized and had a frame added. Give it a try--after all it's free, what do you have to lose?

Abbreviating URL's

Did you know that you can abbreviate URL's? Well, not actually abbreviate them, but you can shorten them.

 

Have you ever run across a URL filled with percent signs and underscores and equal signs? Something that looks like this:

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=0D1ceB_DfBIC&dq=krugman+wells&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=QB-DZ-Yp5z&sig=9i-ysw8CWcJl8UkRF3T-iTIpXQ4&hl=en&ei=sbOdSZPwNJzgM9e3xI0F&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result

 

This could be copied and pasted in a browser, but what if it had to be typed? Here's a solution that is (say it with me) FREE! Go to TinyURL.com and paste in this long URL and it will be converted to something much more manageable, in this case it would be: http://tinyurl.com/aaqu4s Either URL will take you to the same place but isn't http://tinyurl.com/aaqa4s a lot easier to use?

 

So join the movement to stamp out the use of &'s and %'s in URL's and make them tiny.

Old Technology--The Chalkboard

Did you know that there are "thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars" available on the Internet?

That's right, on Academic Earth there are educators from places like Stanford, Yale, Harvard and MIT that have placed full lectures online and, in some cases, full courses. Do you need to refresh your teaching topics? Want to assign a special lecture on Milton? Need help falling asleep?

 

The lectures are referenced by Subject, University, and Instructor. And each lecture is graded! That's right--grades are assigned. There is also a list of Top Rated Courses, Lectures, and Playlists.

 

Not only are they available, but they are FREE! We not only look for exciting and helpful applications to share with you, we try to find free things. There is a place to register, but even the registration is free.

 

So click on Academic Earth, or go to http://www.academicearth.org/, and see if Alan Binder can help you understand the "Origins of the Financial Mess," or if Gilbert Strang can help you with "Linear Algebra," or if Amy Hungerford can explain "The American Novel Since 1945."

Applications for Google Earth

Did you know that you can use Google Earth for more than looking at your home from a  satellite?

 

That's right, Google Earth can give you a lot of information. If, for example, you click the little "+" next to Gallery, under the Layers frame you will see several options. Clicking on one of them, like New York Times, will place icons showing every location where there is a story in the Times. Under 

Geographic Web you can select places where there are Wikipedia

articles.

 

But there is still an even more exciting application that can be used. From the Google Earth website (not the Google Earth program but the website (http://earth.google.com/), you select Gallery from the menu on the left and choose from several topic areas, one of which is Educational. Each topic has applications that can be opened in Google Earth. When you click on the "Open in Google Earth" link the application is transferred to your Google Earth program and can be found under the Temporary Places folder in the Places frame.

 

There are some excellent educational applications that can be used in the classroom. Things like "World Population Density," "Darfur--Destruction of 1,000 Villages," and "Age of Exploration: Magellan's Circumnavigation of the World," can enhance a lecture or discussion with information that visually enhances learning. 

Click here for a short video on adding these applications to your Google Earth program.

Creating Screen Captures

TechSmith, who produces Camtasia Studio and Snagit, also provide a free screen capture program (available for both PC and Mac) that will allow you to create short (5 minutes or less, but should a screeen capture really be longer than that?) videos. 

This product is called Jing. Today, Jing is offering an expanded set of features in Jing Pro, which costs $14.95 a year. For this price you get a better quality of movie (an MPEG-4 AVC), smaller video files, a link to upload directly to YouTube (you can still upload to other video sharing applications like Facebook), and the Jing branding is gone from the final product. 

I've attached a sample video I created using the free Jing. This file was uploaded to Screencast.com, which has some free space for Jing users and clicking on the link will take you to Screencast where you can view it.  The movie gives instructions on adding photos to Office 2007's PowerPoint.

addingPicturePPT

Finding Quick and Helpful Videos for Topics

Have you ever wanted someone to explain Wikis in Plain English, or how about Twitter in Plain English? Maybe you want to have someone explain why you should use the new "twisty" light bulbs in plain English. Well someone has done this. Common Craft has created a series of videos that can be found on YouTube. These explain in simple terms a wide variety of web applications as well as some other topics (like Electing a US President in Plain English).

 

You can find these short movies (around 3 minutes long) by clicking here or search on YouTube for the words "Plain English." There are several other individuals who have created "in plain English" videos. Some are pretty good, some are funny, and some are--well, not everything on the web is worth while.

Watching these won't make you an expert but at least you won't be in the dark. As always, call us if we can help you.

ChaCha is more than a dance

Did you know that you can get a question answered on your cell phone. That's right, as they describe it,

ChaCha is like having a smart friend you can call or text for answers on your cell phone anytime for free! ChaCha works with virtually every provider and allows people with any mobile phone device - from basic flip phones to advanced smart phones - to ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message in just a few minutes.

All you have to do is text your question to 242242 (ChaCha) or call 800-2ChaCha and ask your question. You'll receive the answer by a text message in a few minutes. You can get the weather, stock info (who wants that now!), scores or answers to general questions in a matter of minutes. Give it a try. Remember two things:

1. Any charges for text messaging on your phone may apply.
2. Students may already know about ChaCha, so watch out for cell phone texting during exams!

As always, please let us know in ITDE if we can help.

Create Easy Animations

There is another Web 2.0 application that can help you create exciting animations by using an application called GoAnimate. Here is a sample I created in only a few minutes on my MacBook.



This is an easy application to learn and the instructional videos are very helpful. You can create some interesting introductions to lessons for classroom or online classes. Give it a try and see what you can create. As always, if we can help please call us.

Here is a great application that you can use to easily create an exciting slideshow? Using ANIMOTO can make you can look like a professional.

This is one of neatest Web 2.0 application I've seen, and once you've seen it I'm sure you'll agree! Take a look at this example I created for the 2009 NUTN Conference:

http://animoto.com/play/FY4aT1CSxDFk4gwLz5M7vQ.

I made this by simply uploading images, selecting the music from the site and ANIMOTO did the rest. Here's the best part--it was FREE! And once your done you can share your video by posting it to Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, or any number of other online sites as well as YouTube.

You need to set up an account (it's free) and then start uploading JPG or GIF images. There are some size restrictions (images need to be less than 5MB) and the free slideshow is limited to 30 seconds, but you can look pretty creative in that time. If you want to create longer shows you need to sign up for an All-Access Pass. Sounds like a catch doesn't it, but it only costs $30.00 a year for unlimited videos of extended length. I really encourage you to take a look at this site. You can use slideshows to introduce content in your classes or for showing off your children. You can even have students create slideshows for class projects. There are lots of creative uses that you can find.

Here is an example of a movie that I created (another one for the NUTN Conference) using the All-Access Pass I purchased (yes, I sprung for the $30.00) and was able to download to my computer when I finished. It's the same length because that is how long the song is.

On Good Morning America today (Friday, October 10, 2008) they did a segment about cheating on tests.  There were some fairly creative ways students had posted on YouTube exposing the way they suggested to each other.  Here are a couple of links to those videos in case you would like to check them out for yourself:

Teacher's Guide to Examination Cheating

Top 10 Ways to Cheat

Cheat and Never Get Caught

How to Cheat on a Test (featured on GMA)

How to Cheat on a Test (by Kiki, also featured on GMA)

ANGEL Wingtips

As a service to our instructors, we have a blog just for ANGEL 'how-to' tips and we call it ANGEL Wingtips.  The blog address is http://angelwingtips.blogspot.com

If you have any requests for items to add to the Wingtips, please send Jeff or Angela a note or post a request on the blog and we will add it to our list.

Websites for Videos

Did you know that there are several options for finding videos that can help with student learning besides YouTube and Teacher Tube? e>Training magazine listed several sites in their September, 2008 edition. I have looked at these sites and provide a link, short description and review (graded from * for not so good to ***** for an excellent site) in the list below.

• Blip TV a place where individuals can post their videos using any format they chose.****
• eHow is a site with lots of instructions on how to do a variety of activities.***
• eyejot is a sight that requires a free registration and a webcam. You can upload a video massages. Could be a nice way to introduce students to your class.****
• FixMyMovie takes movies from your mobile phone or digital camera and improves the quality of them by increasing the resolution and brightens them up. ****
• Instructables is a site that calls itself the world's biggest Show and Tell. Like eHow it has a lot of "how to's." All the way from how to draw graffiti to how to make a Flintstones car. *****
• Kyte is another site with videos made and from TV shows from around the world.**
• LearnHub is a site that offers more than videos. It describes itself, "for people who love learning and sharing knowledge with others. It is a set of tools that make learning online fun and engaging, and teaching online easy and effective." Nice site and well laid out.*****
• LearningPortal, like LearningHub, has good materials for learning. It's just not as broad ranged.***
• Mydeo offers free (for one month) hosting for high quality video streaming. Videos kept longer than a month have a charge.**
• Qik is like Twitter for video. People can upload videos from their mobile phones and share them with the world. Educational value--low, uniqueness--high!**
• SchoolTube has lots of videos uploaded from schools (primarily K-12). There are some good videos under the Educators tab.
• Seesmic is another site where you can upload videos but it looks very cool. Videos can be linked from other sites. It appears to have good customer service. There were 16 employees on line when I reviewed the site.*****
• SpotMixer will help you make video ads that could be uploaded to YouTube or downloaded as an MP4. Could have value for a Marketing class. There is a cost for this site.*
• UStream is a place to broadcast your TV show, at no cost. This is really an interesting site and it has a large library of previously created shows.*****
• Veodia is another site where you can create videos that can be uploaded to iPods, websites or even Second Life. I couldn't find any information on cost (there must be some since there is no advertising on the site.****
• VoiceThread "is a powerful new way to talk about and share your images, documents, and videos." At least that's what they say. There is a charge, but free registration will allow some commenting, images and sharing for free. Looks interesting.***

If any of these sites are interesting to you or you would like help in using them, please give us a call in ITDE. We want to help.