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Bitstrips

Comics starring YOU and your Friends. This little tool lets you create stories based on your Facebook friends. You can create avatars and then pop them into interesting or fun situations. This is my first attempt, just with me in the picture:

Free Online ID Card Software Designer

Custom Photo ID Card Printing, with Templates. IDCreator looks like a fun little tool. You can make a wide variety of different sorts of ID cards. There are lots of templates that you can use to make cards such as luggage labels, gift cards, employee badges, business cards, police cards and so on. (Umm, police cards? Like identity cards? Apparently so.) Very simple to use. I think you can download a pdf of the badge or pay them to produce it for you.

Bypass YouTube regional restrictions

ProxFree is a simple and completely free web proxy service.  Unblock and access any YouTube videos in your country now. If you can't watch the video that you're interested in because it's not being shown in your country for some strange reason, Proxfree may be a solution for you. Simply enter the URL of the video you want to watch, choose a server location and IP address and you're then able to view the video. If you still find it's difficult, try a different server location. Should you do this? I have no idea - it depends on why a video was blocked in the first place. However, it's always worth knowing how this stuff works, because if you work in a school for example, you'll need to understand how children may be able to see stuff that you're not expecting them to be able to view.

Freemake Video Converter

Freemake offers a variety of tools, such as the Video Converter. You can use it to download a programme in one format and turn it into another. This does have some interesting side effects. Suppose you download a programme from the BBC iPlayer, and you pick the Windows Media Player as the download option. When it's finished, you can drag the file to your library, and watch it - but of course you only have 30 days to do this. However, if you right click the file and select Properties, and then click the Media usage rights tab, you'll see that it can only be played to the specific date.

However, with the Freemake Video Converter you can click the video option, open the protected iPlayer file and select a different format, such as AVI and click convert. When it's finished, you can drag the converted file across to your media player library and click the Media Rights tab again and you'll see the restrictions have now gone. I wouldn't advise sharing the file with anyone else however, and of course you shouldn't use this option to keep a programme longer than the Media Rights attached to it in the first place.

Hola Better Internet

There are times when you can't see the stuff that you want to see, mainly because you're in the wrong country at the wrong time. Suppose that you're American, and you're in Britain for a holiday, and you want to watch a particular programme on Hulu for example. You can't, because it's blocked in the UK. This is where Hola's unblocker comes into play. You can download it and install it, and the application makes it appear as if you're accessing the resource from within the USProblem solved. This may also help if the content that you want to look at has been blocked for other, political reasons.

Generatedpaper

Free printable papers for the daily use. Lovely idea. Do you need lined paper? Memo paper? Dotted paper? This website has over 40 templates that you can simply download and then print out to use however you want. All free. So if you fancy a quick game of battleships... this is the site to start you off!

ChatWing for online chat

ChatWing is a product that I've reviewed before, but was asked to take another look at it since they've made a lot of changes. It's a nice site - you can create your own chatroom really quickly. New functionality includes the ability to include video straight in the chat box, as well as images and hotlinks. You can also password protect chat and force login and change styles. It also supports 9 different languages. I tried it out yesterday, and it's quite impressive. I shall be using it on my multimedia courses!

Bingo card generator

Use the Bingo card generator tool to create your bingo cards easily and quickly !. Bingo Card App is a bingo card generatorthat lets you make custom printable bingo cards. You can use Bingo Card App to create hundreds of random/unique bingo cards and print them using printer friendly in PDF format(with no ads or watermarks). Every card is unique and scrambled, Let's play your bingo game, it's free.

I think this would be great for educational use, or perhaps fun on a course.

Meograph adds search function

"Meograph is the easiest way to create multimedia stories. With no training you can quickly create stories about the news, history, travels, life events, and more by combining video, audio, pictures, text, links, maps, and timelines. Then share by embedding anywhere on the web, or through your favorite social network." I'm very keen on Meograph - it's a great tool and it does exactly what they say that it does (quote above). They've now added in a search function so that you can see what guides have been added. There's a lot of them which have been created by children, and it's really interesting to see what they have done.

So far over 40,000 stories have been told, and now folks will be able to see all of them (including content created by other teachers and classrooms!).  Unique features include:

• Meoscore: Scoring system that automatically ranks stories by quality/completeness, using number of moments, percent narrated, media included, etc.
• Deep search: Because Meographs are saved as datasets on the backend, we can discover search terms in every subelement of the story in a way that no other media can.
• Organization: Ability to sort by relevance, popularity, and recentness.

Free PDF to PowerPoint Conversion Online

With PDFConverter.com It says of itself "Use our online PDF to Powerpoint Converter to create editable Powerpoint slides easily and quickly. Conversion is done online, relieving you of the need to install yet another piece of software on your hard disk. All you need to do is upload your PDF file, provide the email address where we can send you your converted document, and sit back and relax. Maximum file size of an uploaded file is 2MB." I haven't tried it myself, but it looks neat and tidy - and very easy to use.