Free Software
Who doesn’t shudder with glee when you hear the word “free”?!
Performance Evaluation and Feedback: Media Notes is an assessment tool that allows faculty and students to assess student performances using digital audio or video clips. While viewing a student’s clips, you can provide direct feedback and commentary on your analysis. Students can also assess themselves and their peers. The software tool was developed at BYU and is free for all interested faculty and students. Contact us for download information at 422-8180.
Online Surveys: Qualtrics is a powerful yet intuitive online survey software product that was developed by a BYU faculty and is free to all BYU faculty, administrators, and students. To create an account, click here and complete the online form.
Note: You must use your BYU e-mail address ending in @byu.edu or @byu.net (for example, xyz@byu.edu, xyz@mail.byu.edu, or xyz@byu.net). A valid e-mail address at BYU informs the system at Qualtrics that you are authorized to create an account.
Note: Initially, all accounts are set to the default level of use, which limits the number of survey responses to 500, the number of active surveys to 3, and total surveys (active and inactive) to 15. You may request an upgrade to your account if you are faculty or staff, or if you are a student working for faculty and staff. Upgraded accounts have increased limits on the number of surveys you can create or the number or responses for each survey. To request an upgrade, email the Qualtrics Brand Administrator for BYU, Larry Seawright, or call at 422-8151.
Video Screen Capture: Camstudio is a screen capture product that allows one to create movies of everything that can be seen and heard on your computer. It can produce both .avi and .swf (flash) movies.
Collaborative Writing: Google Docs is a free word processor that allows you to share documents with other coauthors. Google Docs also includes the ability to create shared spreadsheets and presentations as well. Buzzword is another online word processor that allows sharing, and has a fuller feature set, but you can only create text documents. These resources are great for facilitating group projects.
Audio Editing: Audacity is an open source audio editing program. If you want to convert your files to mp3, go to Zamzar to do the conversion or install the .mp3 plugin when prompted.
HTML Editing: NVU is a free html editing program made by the creators of Netscape and Mozilla Firefox.
Online File Conversion: Go to PDFonline or Neevia to convert files to PDFs. Go to Zamzar to convert almost any other file types.
Online Graphics Creators: To create simple graphics without installing expensive software, try Media Builder or Cooltext.
Podcasting Tools: Record podcasts by phone with Gabcast and create class audio discussion boards using Yackpack (soon to become a subscription service). Also take a look at the Juice podcast receiver.
Social Bookmarking: Teachertube is an educational alternative to Youtube. Scholar is a Blackboard sponsored social linking site. See what other scholars have bookmarked!
Cognitive Mapping can be done using MindMeister; or Gliffy
Want to explore other free gadgets? Try one of these.
Zoho Online spreadsheets, wikis, and much more
Thinkature Online tool for drawing diagrams
Tubes Now Allows the user to create websites with materials they have on their own desktop. Automatically updates the websites you create.
Userplane Online chats, videos, and messaging.
Additional Information