There are many digital tools available to help you document and share experiences and insights related to school closures and co-location. If you are a student in a school that is being phased out, or if your school is already closed, or if you are simply interested in activism around school abandonment, experiment with these knowledge streams and let your voice be heard!
Check out Timeglider a web-based timeline software for creating and sharing history, project planning and more. Create, collaborate, and publish zooming and panning interactive timelines. It’s like Google Maps, but for time.
Use Flickr to tell a story with your photos. Include rich descriptions such as titles, tags, location, people and more to give your photo context and a life of its own. Share your photos and have a conversation through comments, faves, notes and more.
Use Piktochart, a DIY infographic tool, to transform boring data into memorable stories. Use your visual stories to engage your web audience with exciting presentations.
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Zotero collects all your research in a single, searchable interface. You can add PDFs, images, audio and video files, snapshots of web pages, and really anything else. Zotero automatically indexes the full-text content of your library, enabling you to find exactly what you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes.
Google Maps is a is a web mapping service application and technology. It provides high-resolution aerial or satellite images for most urban areas all over the world. Create custom maps with high quality markers containing locations, descriptions, images, links and directions.
MindMeister lets an individual or a team lay out thoughts visually and easily create appealing mind maps for any project. A mind map is simply a diagram with a concept in the center, and branches leading off it to various directions. MindMeister lets you create a mind map using nothing but a Web browser.
GeoStoryteller is an educational tool that allows you to create stories about physical places. Users can take a walking tour and engage with the GeoStories you have created using their mobile phone.
Prezi is a living presentation tool for visualization and storytelling without slides. It combines creative thinking and technological expertise to allow you to seamlessly create your own high-quality presentations, post them to the internet, and share them with friends.
Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting.
Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit sound files, cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together and change the speed or pitch of a recording.
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.
Use Cowbird to tell stories using photos, text, and sound. When you tell stories on Cowbird, they automatically find connections between your life and the lives of others, forming a vast, interconnected ecosystem, in which we all take part. Their goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.
