Organizational and Creation Tools

I stumbled across these cool organizational tools over the holiday break: Swurl, Favthumbs and PictureTrail. All three programs are free, web based and should be a part of every student's virtual backpack.

Bring your web life together with Swurl. Swurl works like an aggregator for many of your important web based accounts including delicious, blogger, flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Picasa and many others. Swurl is like a one-stop-shop-spot that organizes many of your important links, pics and posts together in one lean online work space.

Favthumbs works hand-in-hand with delicious. Favthumbs converts all of your delicious links into a series of colorful thumbnail images. The thumbnail images can be resized to fit multiple images on a page (as many as 50) or a large single list of thumbnail images. It is a really cool way to get a visual representation of all of your delicious links.

PictureTrail is a really handy tool for creating slideshows and short videos out of your original digital photos. It's a free service, it's easy to use and it's big fun. Enterprising students will immediately see how PictureTrail can be used together with tools like Camtasia, and Snapz to generate video files. Those files can then be imported into programs like iMovie and MovieMaker to create dazzling image sequences.

Sample of PictureTrail Slideshow Tool

H Songhai
1/5/09