You will need a few basic tools to accomplish tasks and produce media assigned on this course.

There is wonderful software out there, which - even though often consumer oriented and free - can produce impressive and professional looking and sounding results, while being pretty simple to initially learn.

Users of Mac OS computers have some powerful tools at the disposals, tools that are included with new Apple systems, or can be easily obtained through the Mac App store.

Mac software required for this course includes iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband (part of the iLife suite or available individually). Besides being easy to use and very well designed, they are optimized to work with Mac systems and are also available for iOS devices (iPod touch, iPad and iPhone)

Windows users can also find numerous software titles that can help create the education materials required by this course. We will focus on the use of Windows Movie Maker 2012, which either came with your Windows PC or can be downloaded here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/get-movie-maker-download

Audacity is a wonderful, free and open source audio editor that can be downloaded for free, for both Mac and Windows here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download

For audacity, and in order to be able to create mp3 audio files, you will need the LAME mp3 library. Read all about it and find download links and installation instructions here:

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html

Another wonderful image cataloguing and basic editing tool is Google's Picasa.

http://picasa.google.com

Picasa is available for Windows and the Mac. Mac users should download and install it if they do not have access to Apple's own iPhoto.

For more comprehensive imaging editing tools, GIMP can do pretty much all that Adobe Photoshop does but it is a free download, open source gem:

http://www.gimp.org

Usage of Office productivity software is not within the scope of this course, but by all means, if you have access to Microsoft Office (Word and Powerpoint), available for both Windows and Mac systems, and iWork (Pages and Keynote for the purposes of this course) there is a lot of tasks that can be accomplished using those - familiar to many - tools. For those of us who do not have access to these commercial software titles or would rather use open source, free software, OpenOffice is a powerful alternative.

https://www.openoffice.org

Often times, new software comes with "Quick Start Guides". Do not skip through it! Software manuals and step-by-step walk thrus can be easily found on the developer's website, and will also be linked here. And finally, many of us already know that for every question there is an answer out there, usually just an internet search away.

This software list is not comprehensive by any means, and will be updated constantly. We are looking forward to suggestions and recommendations by you, the students and users of software tools, in order to add more tools to our software toolbox, making our work easier and the results of our work more impressive, powerful and professional looking and sounding. Did you discover a new app, a new website that makes your work easier or inspires you? Please share it with the group. We can all benefit from your experience.

It is, after all, the main objective of this course to discover new ways, develop new methods and uncover new solutions to our problems, learning through research and collaboration, rather than learning how to use specific and course "specified" tools that may be obsolete by course completion. Technology moves at a break-neck pace. We are not trying to keep up with it here. We are here to lead the revolutionary concept that when education and technology work hand in hand, amazing progress can be achieved.