New Free or Almost Free Tools

I just returned from TechEd 2010 in Pasadena, California. I heard about some really kick-ass technology tools, new to me and maybe new to you. Definitely worth checking out. This batch is all free, so there is nothing to loose in trying them.

Here they are in no particular order:

Jing - Jing has been around for a while, but they sure have souped it up. You can capture anything on your desktop (including a video or photo from somewhere else) and add call outs. You can record yourself clicking on software and record a voice track with it. You can upload the result to a shared location Jing makes available for you, or anywhere else you want. And it is FREE FREE FREE. Jing Pro gives you even more and it's only $14.95 a year. Uh huh. I know -- you can only make videos that are five minutes long, but I think that's actually a feature. Longer videos make my eyes roll back in my head. Say what you need to say and stop.

Sky Drive - Sky Drive gives you 25G of storage for FREE. And it's up in the cloud where you can share it with anyone. I'm thinking of a project that I'm working on where I need to make a variety of files available to people all over the world. I'm going to throw them up on Sky Drive.

Google Websites - Am I the only one who didn't know that Google makes a really easy, slick, cool website creator available for FREE? FREE! And the templates are like they were hanging around listening to my innermost desires. Well, ok, not my innermost. But pretty close to there! That project I mentioned earlier? It's going to live in a Google website.

Irubric - Irubric is a rubric creation tool that is FREE -- and it is a pretty good looking program too. I saw a presentation that the creator of this product gave, and I honestly don't understand why the guy is giving this away but I am very glad he is! I am hoping to develop a rubric to use for performance evaluations next year, and this will be the product that I use to do it.