How 2 Make A Recording on the Web

This is Audio Pal, which is a clever little web-based audio recording service. You record or upload your content and they send you an email. The email takes you to another part of their site that gives you embed code for a fairly diverse range of sites (including Blogger).



You can make a recording several different ways - here's one I made over the phone:



You can also type up to 600 characters and use text-to-speech to create an audio file:


I tried making a recording using two different computer microphones - one that was USB and one that used the "normal" mic jack - but the site seemed to get stuck on "processing" and I didn't see any change in the site itself during the recording (the "time elapsed" indicator didn't indicate any time elapsed....). It might just be a glitch today, or possibly something goofy that happened because of the machine or network I'm on today.


Finally, you can upload an MP3 that you've created (maybe with Audacity??). I would recommend STRONGLY against uploading anything you didn't create (I don't have anything like that handy at the moment, but I'll come back and ammend this post later when I do).

All told - I'm impressed - especially by the phone feature.

How 2 find legal pictures

I learned about creative commons at a presentation by Michelle Lantz at the Ohio Tech-Free Convention in January 2010. You can watch her presentation at THIS link

Creative Commons is a good starting point for finding free-to-use photos - this link list started with Ms. Lantz's materials and has expanded since then (and will probably continue to expand). I found many of these sites from THIS article on TutorialBlog.com.

I didn't include EVERYTHING from either source, the list below are those sites that were easy to navigate, free to use, and easy to determine and properly attribute licensing credits.

Google Image Search - now has an option to search only those images that are labelled for reuse. Click on "Advanced Search" and scroll to the bottom of the next screen to find the checkboxes.

Creative Commons - this is the one-stop searching shop from the nice folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Flickr/Commons - this is a collaboration between Flickr and the Library of Congress. It contains a VERY large collection of public domain photos, all of which are free to be used in any way, many of them are posted in the hopes that people might be able to identify the people or places in them.

Compfight - this photo search engine has the ability to limit search results to images that have creative commons licensing right at the top of the screen.

Stockvault - this website has hundreds of free and free-to-use stock photos of generic "things" and scenes. You can download the pictures without signing up but will need to create an account in order to bookmark, email or comment on the pictures, or to upload your own.

MorgueFile - another website with lots of free and free-to-use photos. Pictures here have no licensing at all and do not need to be attributed.

FreeRange - this site is loaded with free and free-to-use stock photos. You'll need to register for a free account in order to download photos.

EveryStockPhoto - this one is more of a search engine for looking for photos. Use Advanced Search to make choices about license, resolution, account requirements, etc. It does not currently have a checkbox for creative commons licensing, but it does have a box that will display the licensing used by the photographer.

StockXChng - huge site. All photos are free and free-to-use.

OpenPhoto - another huge site full of free and free-to-use photos. You only need to register if you want to upload and contribute your own photos.

PhotoRogue - this site takes free and free-to-use to the next level. You can actually make a REQUEST for a particular image you would like to use and their network of photographers will go to work to make it happen for you - all for free!

Geek Philosopher - this site offers log-in, but does not require it. Photos are free and free-to-use with artist attribution (you give credit to the photographer)

PhotoRack - this site offers free and free-to-use photos without required log-in. What's especially cool about this one is the EXTENSIVE heirarchy of categories on its home page which makes it very easy to find exactly what you want. Don't use the right-click download trick....look for the link to download without the watermark.

FreePixels - another site free and free-to-use photos. This one also has a nice heirarchy of categories and also has a tags cloud on the homepage to help you find what you're looking for.

DesignPacks - this site offers up free and free-to-use photos that are organized into coordinated groups of photos. You download a zip file and get a bunch of pictures that would all work together in the same project because they have the same values, color schemes, etc.

FreeFoto - this site uses Creative Commons licensing, asking for link-back and attribution. Many photos also ask that you don't manipulate the images to create new ones. They explain it all in an easy-to understand rules page and each image has an easy button-link to display the license for that particular file.

PixelPerfectDigital - I didn't see anything on this site about licensing for their stock photo collection - but I also didn't see anything restricting use of their images. One thing I liked a lot was the information and news about digital photography in general, which is a nice mix of guru-geek-speak and every day language.


FreeDigitalPhotos - this site offers web-quality images for free, and high-quality printable images for a price. They ask for attribution and even provide the html code to create the link that includes the artist's name.


PublicDomainPhotos - this site has a large collection of free and free-to-use photos and clipart. No attributions are required, but users are warned to be careful about images that include logos (like a picture of a storefront).

HistoricalStockPhotos - this site offers free and free-to-use web-quality photos for email and personal websites. If you want printables, they provide a link to another site, and the prices there are not low.

NationsIllustrated - this is a Canadian site that houses free-to-use photos (non-commercial use is allowed) from all over the world. Registration allows you to upload, rate and comment on pictures. When you see a picture you like, you add it to a download list, and then download all of the photos you've chosen as a zip file.

KaveWall - this site specializes in very close-up images of common things. They use Creative Commons licensing asking for attribution and non-commercial use. Web-quality images are free, and high-resolution images are available for purchase. The site also sells t-shirts and offers graphic design services.

ImageBase - this site says on its homepage that you can treat all images as public domain (free and free to use). It includes not only images but also powerpoint templates and offers even high-resolution downloads for free.

Cepolina - this is an international collection of free and free-to-use images that asks for attribution to the website. Many levels of resolution are available for free download and the homepage includes a nice category list to help you with your browsing.

Image*After - this site offers both images and textures (each listed in its own drop-down menu from the homepage) and allows ANY use of its pictures except creating another webpage like theirs. No attribution required. The images looked kind of amateurish (like someone's vacation snapshots), but the texture images definitely did have that "artsy" quality to them.

ZenTextures - this site was mentioned in a comment to the TutorialBlog article. There is a terms of use link on the homepage that says you are free to do anything with the images except sell them as your own work or host them on your own site. and the textures are beautiful.

FreeStockImages and RoyaltyFreeImages - these two websites are owned and operated by the same person. Not much in the way of organization or searching with tags, but very pretty texture images that are probably worth the browsing time, especially since they're totally free and free-to-use-however-you-like.

Whew!!! Did I miss your favorite source? Tell everyone about it in the comments!

How 2 Record and Edit sound files

The very coolest sound recording and editing software ever is not only awesome, it's free (and free is a good price)



There are a lot of manuals and resources out there to get the most from this tool, but if you've ever used any sort of recorder (even a tape recorder - remember those?) you can probably start playing within a few minutes.

Your project can then be saved as an audacity project or exported as a wav file or an mp3

Because of copyright laws, the software for encoding mp3 (the format you're most likely to want) can't be distributed directly with this software, but you can quickly download what you need by following the directions HERE

How 2 Share Presentations or Documents on the Web

Powerpoint has pretty much replaced posterboard for research projects that are either supposed to be "more fun" than traditional research papers, or that really do need more visuals than straight text.

However - there are a great many possible formats to these, and the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, with its members-only format, has made transferring these projects from student computer to teacher computer extra-difficult.

Plus - there's always the problem of "I saved the wrong version" or "my email won't let me send a file that big".

Try www.slideshare.net



Slideshare will handle up to 100MB files in the following formats:
Presentations: pdf, ppt, pps, pptx, ppsx, pot, potx (Powerpoint); odp (OpenOffice); key, zip (Apple Keynote).
Documents: pdf, doc, docx, rtf, xls (MSOffice); odt, ods(OpenOffice); Apple iWork Pages.

You can choose for your document to be viewable by the whole world, just you, or somewhere in between. You can make your file downloadable or not.

This is a free site but it requires a log-in. There is also a short wait time while your file is processed before you can access it. For this blog post, I created a 3-slide powerpoint file and it took just a few seconds to upload, and it was availble for viewing in about 3 minutes.

Not only can your presentation now be viewed (small or full-screen) from any internet-connected computer, but you can generate embed code to post anywhere AND you can email a link to anyone. If you like, slideshare will import your address book from most of the popular webmail services.

Others (from the world, or from the list of people you invited) can leave comments.

There are tools on the site to add in an audio file to create what they call a "slidecast" - this is not to upload music - it's intended for a recording of a speaker who might be using the presentation. [note: make this recording with audacity] If you click on the link for that option, there are several help files available that will guide you through the process of synchronizing the audio file and the visual of your slides.


You can even post a transcript of the audio portion of your presentation.

Most of the presenters at an educational technology convention I recently attended used this site to post the presentation materials they used. A few talked about how they taught their students to use it for projects.

Here's the presentation I created to test this out:

Sample Presentation

View more presentations from awaldfogle.