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Venngage: This is a great tool for creating several different types of visual materials, such as infographics, presentations, reports, diagrams, and lesson plans. The tool has a variety of templates for you to choose from, and you’ll find the templates’ ease-of-use convenient when you want to build visuals in a short amount of time. Venngage is also cloud-based, so you can continue working on templates from any device. Create up to five free projects. FREE/PAID
Vimeo Record: A Google Chrome extension that allows users to easily record their screen. The video is automatically uploaded to Vimeo where users can change the title, privacy, and other features before sharing it with students. Free accounts can upload up to 5GB of content a week. FREE/PAID
Screencast-O-Matic: A video creation tool that allows a user to record their screen and create simple recordings via a downloaded tool. Users can take high-resolution videos of screen recordings up to 15 minutes in length and add caption files. Videos are stored in an online hub and links can be shared with students and colleagues.
Animaker: Online introductory level platform that allows people to create animation and live-action content. Allows for beginner-friendly storytelling and narration through video. FREE/PREMIUM.
WriterDuet: screenwriting software with cloud-based collaborative features, outline/corkboard viewing mode, and support for several file types. Free trial for your first three screenplays; subscription plans and one-time-purchase available. Free/Paid.
Sutori (former HSTRY): storytelling platform designed as a vertical timeline. Sutori is great for visualizing steps in a process, and for when you want to incorporate rich multimedia: you can embed images, PDF files, audio, videos, quizzes, Google Docs, tweets, forums, Padlets, and more into your timelines and share them via URL or embed code. See this Sutori example for a comprehensive list of its features. Sutori’s platform includes features for educational use, with different visibility and sharing options and basic classroom management. Free/Paid.
Medium: a sleek blog-publishing platform designed for optimizing interactions between author and readers with marginalia comments, which can be made private or public (the latter, with the approval of the author). Comments can be enabled in fully published mode or in draft mode (whose visibility is limited to individuals with the unlisted link). Great platform for collaborative authoring and/or annotating text. The blog also aggregates post by themes, rather than authors allowing users to find stories that are similar to their “favorites.” FREE.
See our post on How to Use Medium in the Classroom.
Scalar: open-source, media-rich scholarly publishing platform ideal for creating non-linear narratives. Requiring minimal technical expertise, this platform offers its authors a robust database system for to catalogue their work, which can be experienced by the public through different pathways, and from different access points. It supports collaborative authoring, reader comments, and offers a wide range of annotating tools. FREE.
NYU has licensed a set of Google products to handle communication, calendars, file storage, and other teaching and learning apps, according to these Terms of Use. The full suite of Google Apps for Education include:
CartoDB’s Odyssey: create interactive, map-driven stories in a simple sandbox, and embed the final product anywhere. Combine your text with Odyssey’s library , and explore templates, actions and behaviors directly on the sandbox prior to publishing. See an example.