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Tasmanian Society for Information Technology in Education

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Free software and online tools for education 

After the TASITE AGM on March 5 2009, members shared ideas on free software for education. A list of useful software was assembled and an online survey was developed. Iinterested educators began to rate the free tools, and new suggestions were added.

Finally, after several weeks, a list of the "Top 10" free tools for education had emerged based on rankings by Australian teachers.

And so, colleagues, to the top 15 (there were several cases where the difference in votes was too close to call, so the 10 became 15)

In order:

	1		Audacity  [Audio recording, editing, [http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ]
	2		Scratch [Programmable animation http://scratch.mit.edu ]
	3		VLC Media Player [Media Player http://www.videolan.org/ ]
	4		PhotoStory [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx ]
	5		Picasa [photo organiser www.picasa.com ]
	6		Game Maker [Game Programming http://www.yoyogames.com ]
	7		Hot Potatoes [Quiz Maker http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ ]
	8		Google Sketchup 3D modelling: [http://sketchup.google.com/]
	9		Movie Maker [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx ]
	10		Open Office [Office suite http://www.openoffice.org/ ]
	11		The Google suite - [Google docs, iGoogle etc[www.google.com ]
	12		Gimp [Image Manipulation http://www.gimp.org/ ]
	13		edublogs [ www.edublogs.org ]
	14		Irfanview [Graphic viewer, editor http://www.irfanview.com ]
	15		wikispaces [ www.wikispaces.com ]

There are a few provisos here of course.

• The people who voted will not necessarily be representative of all sectors, teaching specialisations or experience levels.
• Some may have voted for many tools, others for only one.
• There was no differentiation of platform or operating system.
• The items that were added progressively to the list would not have had the same exposure to voting as those that were include initially (though as it happens two of the items on the top 15 list were late entries).

But as a guide to what other Australian educators find most useful, this could be a nice starting point for a discussion on what should be available to every student.

Thanks to all the educators who voted, and those who gave suggestions for their favourite online tools.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Author is TASITE Inc www.tasite.tas.edu.au