Easy Photo Editing

If you or your students need to edit photographs or pictures quickly, easily and for free, then DrPic.com could be the place for you. You can crop, resize add text change colours and create a number off effects with the real minimum of ease. You simply upload a picture from your computer and start to play.

You can also download the images to your hard drive or upload them to the web and all without any registration or passwords.

DrPic is a great tool for creating your own flash cards, adding text to images or just giving your students some hands on practice at doing their own photo editing. I'll certainly be using this myself.

Related links:

• Downloading Online video
• Photo Assignments for EFL ESL Students in Second Life
• Exploiting Image Sequences
• Free video editing software
• Edit Online videos
• Online photo editing

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Nik Peachey Read More..

Free PDF editor

I haven't tried this yet, but I have just seen a free PDF editor on SourceForge.net

Here's what it says; "Free editor for PDF documents. Complete editing of PDF documents is possible with PDFedit. You can change raw pdf objects (for advanced users) or use many gui functions."

Sounds pretty handy. I would also recommend keeping an eye on and having a look around SourceForge.net as there is quite a lot of useful free software there.

Hope you find it useful

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Nik Read More..

DVD converter

Handbrake is a really useful piece of free software I've been using recently. It enables you to convert and even edit DVDs so that you can play them on other devices. This includes a range of mobile devices like i-pod and Sony PSP as well as just playing them on your computer / TV.

It also gives you the option of copying them with the subtitles showing or just saving particular scenes and reduces the file sizes for storing back ups of your DVDs.

It's really useful and runs on a range of platforms MAC and Linux as well as Windows.

Hope you find it useful, but remember to respect copyright laws.

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Nik Read More..

Downloading Online video

iDesktop.tv provides a really useful and user friendly service for anyone who wants to use video clips from sources like YouTube, but doesn't want their students looking around at anything unsuitable, or for anyone who has ever found a really useful clip, only to go back later and find it has moved or been removed.

You can use the site to search through a huge collection of videos from various video sharing sites and when you find something you like the site will download and convert it to a file type of your choosing.

The range of file types is great and includes ones suitable for mobile phones and i-pods, so if you want to get your students doing some mobile learning then this is a seriously useful site.

The site is free and you can use it without login or registration, though if you do register, it's free and you do get other services too.

Hope you find this useful and by all means leave a comment here if you've tried it.

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Nik Read More..

Free video editing software

I just spotted this rather nice simple video editing suite from Pinnacle. It's free to download (150Mb) and has quite a few nice features that put it above the standard Microsoft video editor.

It supports flash and direct upload to YouTube, it also enables you to save your movies in a number of formats, many of which are compatible with a range of mobile devices such as i-pod and Sony PSP.

I've downlaoded it and it seems pretty easy to use. You can add transitions, text , music sound effects etc.

The catch is that if you want to keep using the codecs that enable you to export to DivX and Mepg2 - 4, then after a 15 day trial you'll need to buy those. Not sure yet how much they are though.

You can download it from: http://videospin.com/

If you don't need those, then this is a really handy video editor for free.
It runs on Vista and XP, but not MAC, but then if you have a MAC you won't need it.

Hope you find this useful

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Nik Read More..

Edit Online videos

Scenemaker.net looks like a really handy tool. It allows you to create your own channel and capture just the parts of various YouTube and other online videos. That way you can just show your students the parts you want them to watch. It also gives you an 'embed code' so that you can embed the video clip into your own blog or digital materials.

This is a nice way to grab and edit online video without having to download it onto your own computer and break the law.

Also helps to stop your students from wandering off onto other unsuitable stuff.

Hope you find it useful

Best

Nik Read More..