The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It's hard sometimes being both cheap and honest. While I am sometimes far too easily parted from my money (just ask my wife, she'll have many, many stories to tell you), one thing I can't do is steal software online. I know, it is easy. It's all out there online, just waiting for someone to come along and help themselves to it. At places like Pirate Bay, there are literally hundreds of applications that you can download. I also know all of the other arguments. Yes, the companies are still making millions of dollars in profits. Yes, they probably will never know; and finally, yes, they will never miss my purchase. But as far as I am concerned, it is still stealing. Which is why I try to do everything I can instead to find free stuff. And over the last few weeks, I've found two more cool tools online that are completely free and which do some interesting things. It seems like companies are finally learning that we don't want a piece of software that does several dozen different things, none of them well. What we do want are applications that work, that are effective, and that do what they promise. Enter Voice Thread and Animoto. Voice Thread I found about three weeks ago and I was simply amazed by its simplicity. First, set up a free account. Second, upload pictures that you have saved on your computer, or even better, if you've got an account at Flickr, you can simply pull pictures from there over to Voice Thread at a single click of a mouse. You can choose the pictures you want, organize them in any order you want. This just makes them into a slide show like you might make with PowerPoint or another tool like that. The cool part comes in next. Voice Thread pulls up your pictures one by one and lets you record your own voice talking about your picture. You obviously need a mic of some kind hooked to your machine, but just like an old tape deck, Voice Thread just has a record and play button. You talk into the mic, press done when you are done and then it lets you listen to yourself. If you aren't happy with what you've recorded, you can simply delete it and do it again. No complex commands of any kind. Finally, when you are finished with your pictures and your recording, Voice Thread saves everything, and gives you an address that you can send to people to share what you've made. They can even come back and record their own voice comments about what you've made, and it builds their thoughts right into the presentation. A simple, powerful tool combining pictures and voice that is absolutely free. We are using it in my classroom to introduce my students to another class in Los Angeles that we are working with this year. The second thing that was sent to me was a site called Animoto. Hopefully this is one site that will help to end dozens of boring presentations. Animoto is also free and you can set up an account very easily. Again, you just load your pictures into it in the order that you want them to be. But then this site combines your pictures with some music that is already on the site and puts them together into a movie. You can edit how long things last and play with a lot of cool effects and in the end you have a complete video production with your pictures and music added in to it. Very cool and once again, very free. As the Internet heats up, there are a lot of new tools that are online and free. They are worth some of your surfing time when you are looking to kill a few hours on a cold evening. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
