Troovi - Photo Sharing

Troovi is a site that provides a URL for sharing photos.  Working on a project with students and want a collection of Photos?  Troovi can do that.  Teach a Journalism class and want a student to save the photos that night for you to see without having to download them?  Troovi can do that.  Teach Yearbook?  Yeah, that too.  What a great idea.  A place to share and upload photos to one URL.

A collection is deleted if it is not accessed for more than 30 days.  90 days with a premium account.  The basic version allows for 500 photos per collection for completely free.  You can sign up for an account, free or premium, and then log in when you visit the site.

I really think this could be a useful way for students to share photos they find for a project, collage, discussion, etc.  My school did block my ability to upload photos though, so that could be an issue, but if done from home, still a way for students to share pictures. 

When they allow the opportunity to create your own URL, that will make the site even better.

HowjSay

howjsay is a great resource for any teachers out there working with ESL students, or even students at a young age who struggle with pronunciation of English words.  You type in the word that a student is struggling to pronounce and the web based software will read the word to you with a very clear and concise voice.  You scroll over the word with your mouse and it will pronounce the word every time your mouse passes over the word you highlight.  You can list up to 6 entries for it to find.

Do you have some other students struggling with a foreign language?  Well, type in that word in English, and then use the Google Translator and it will translate it into the language for you.  howjsay will not pronounce though.  At least not yet, maybe in the future.

Want students to know the definition?  That is an option as well.  Students can also click on a "define" link and it will define it using Google Dictionary.

Have an iPhone?  You can also find the HowjSay iPhone App as well.

Write.fm

Write.fm is a site for creating and sharing documents.  You can even upload a file to the document, so another way to share and discuss a picture, article, cartoon, etc.  The site also allows you to EASILY create your own URL.  This would be a great way as an educator to go paperless if your school has not provided a way for you to do so.  Like most of these sites, I am sure that whatever you create becomes their property.

Kizoa - Digital Story Telling

Kizoa is another website for creating Digital stories out of photos.  The main difference so far is that it also offers the ability to edit those photos as well with more features than I have seen from the other web-based applications.  You can add transitions, flash animations, text, effects, and frames to the pictures when adding them to the slide-show making them more appealing to the viewer.

You can sort your photos into albums and give photos tags helping you keep them organized.  You can share it with others and create private groups that people can join.  Kizoa is completely free. Uploading 100 photos was rather simple.  I was blocked by the firewall at my school, but doing it from home was easy.  The user interface was also very easy to use as well.  With the free account you get 1024 MB of storage, so if you plan on using high quality images, you probably want to pay for an account.

When finished you can burn the slide-show to a DVD, convert slide-show into video, and download and play the slide-show offline. Impressive software.  Feels like they took the best of some of the others and combined them into one.

You Convert It

YouConvertIt is another option for converting your files.  But that is not all it does.  It can also Download Videos from the web and then convert them using the website.  It also provides an option for sending files (up to 300 MB if you sign up for Free Account, 120 MB without signing up.) via email from them web.  By signing up for the free account you get 1 GB of space and 6 GB of monthly bandwidth size, as well as a personal in-box.  There are more options if you decide to have a pay account.  There are several files that you can convert files from.  They are broken down by image, video, audio, document, and archive.