1. Big Huge Labs – 40 fun ways you can manipulate Flickr images…my favorite Flickr mashups to date! (see my previous post: Big Huge Labs = Fun + Easy Integration).
2. Animal Photos! – Images on this site are under creative commons and are free to use on web sites and other projects.
3. Birds of the World – This service allows you to browse through list of all the birds of the world categorized by continent, country. Photos of the birds are fetched from Flickr service, shown along is a link to Wikipedia, with more information about the selected bird.
4. Bookr- a tool to create photobooks using Flickr images. Photobooks may be e-mailed or embedded in blogs. View my sample below…
5. Bubblr- fun flickr mashup that lets you add cartoon bubbles to photos. View my sample below…
6. Clockr – random digit images from Flickr to display the current time. Click on a number to change the image, doubleclick it to view the full image. Use the mouse wheel to cycle through.
7. Color Fields Colr Pickr – Great way to find Flickr photos by color. Select colors diretly or use the slider to adjust lightness and darkness.
8. Compfind – Find images for comps, research or inspiration. You can search using Creative Commons settings as well as safe settings.
9. Digipoem – generates visual representations of poetry and other text sources using folksonomic image tagging on Flickr.
   Text sources are also converted into an XML Poem format available to the user (DTD/Schema coming soon).
10. fastr – a fun Flickr game in which you view a set of ten images and try to guess the common tag. Time based scoring.
11. Flash Gallery – a free application that allows you to create a slideshow on your website easy and fast. You don’t need any programming skills to install or use it. Just embed it into your website and script will automatically form a slideshow from a specified folder or from Flickr photostream.
12. FlickIt! – a simple yet extremely useful web service for dynamically generating thumbnails of anything.

Look for more Flickr Fun recommendations in the future!

We gave her student an opportunity to select a Voki character and then used the phone so the student could provide a voice for his character. The smile on the student’s face as he heard his character talk online in a personified voice was simply priceless. If you haven’t used Voki to give your students a voice (or should I say their characters a voice) you really need to check out this free and simple to use online tool. Of course, the success of using Voki with a speech student led me to wonder what other technology resources could be used to help speech students. So, today’s column is dedicated to speech teachers and their students. You can view my Voki sample on the left of this post or learn more about Voki by reading my previous Voki post. Below, I have posted some additional resources that could also be used to help speech students:

• Take time to download the free program Photo Story 3 as a motivational software option that could be used to give students an opportunity to practice speaking (via a microphone). Photo Story 3 can only be used on PC computers, but it is a great wizard-driven presentation program that students can use to turn images into movies (in .wmv format). Students can easily record their voices, add music and transitions to photographs and/or images to create a .wmv movie. You can learn more about Photo Story 3 when you access a resource site I created to supplement a workshop I gave a couple of years ago…simply click on the screen shot below to learn more about the program:

• Audiopal is a free online “service that gives individuals an easy and effective way to add audio to their online message.” While this Web 2.0 tool does not have the “glam” factor that Voki has, it does a fine job of adding voice to a site and could be used to record digital speech samples that could be posted to a student portfolio, accessed from the site, or sent to a parent via email. Audiopal was simple to use and did not require registration. Voice can be recorded with a microphone or via phone using a toll free number. I have embedded a sample recording below:
  
• Cinch is another tool that records a voice, image (photo of a student, maybe?), and text. When you register for a Cinch account you can save your Cinch recordings on your page. You can even organize recordings in albums…create an album for each speech student so you can track student progress and provide samplings. Cinch recordings can be shared via Twitter or Facebookor kept private. Recordings can be made via a microphone connected to your computer or you can call a phone number to record (the phone number was not toll free). Recordings can be twittered, posted on Facebook, posted to the Cinch site, saved on your personal Cinch page, or embedded on a webpage or blog.  UPDATE!!!! – PLEASE NOTE: this is no longer a free product I’m sad to report.
• Wetoku is another online recording service that presumably makes it simple and easy to record interviews…like…a speech teacher interviewing his/her student. I’ll be honest. I did not test this online tool, but the sample interviews looked interesting and I would classify this resource as a Web 2.0 tool that holds promise. If you take Wetoku for a test drive let us know what you think! (It has been receiving some great reviews…see a sample on The 16th Minute blog).

While Vidque does not serve as a replacement to Fliggo, it is a powerful tool to include in your bag of techno-organizational tricks. Creating a video library that is accessible using the tags you assign is very powerful and sharing the great videos you collect and add to your collection is simple and useful. Send links to students, friends, and colleagues or simply twitter the video link (based on your Vidque address) to your followers. You can save up to 20 videos a day once you have registered for a free account and set up your profile. Saving a video from any site is as simple as clicking on a button (once you have installed the Vidque bookmarklet in your browser) or you can add videos to your account manually using the Add Video Page. Currently the bookmarklet works in the following browsers: Chrome, Foxfire, Safari, and Opera.

I am gradually building a new library of videos using Vidque.