Susan is director of South Carolina College of Education's Instructional Support office and teaches an introduction to Educational Technology course and an introduction to Special Education course. She has taught face-to-face, through broadcast distance education, and entirely online. (She loves to discuss the pros and cons of each model!) She assists other faculty members use technology as they plan and develop their courses.

Susan's Top 10 Tools as at 28 August 2007

1. SnagIt -  Students like to see screen shots of what they will see in a program or an online activity when I write the instructions or provide a help sheet for them.

2. Breexe Presenter (now Adobe Presenter) - Online students love the narrated PowerPoint presentations with a table of contents, search feature, and that shows the time remaining on the

3. Camtasia - I can't count the number of 'Camtasia movies' I have made demonstrating a web site - like I would have done live in a face-to-face class.

4. OpenOffice - I have gotten personal thank you notes from students for introducing them to Open Office.org!

5. Audacity - I am a big believer in open source tools and this one does everything the expensive programs do.

6. GIMP - Why pay the high price for the photo editing programs when GIMP does it for free?

7. Breeze Meeting (now Adobe Connect Professional) - Live class meetings in which you can share items on your computer and distant students can give live presentations to the online class (The instructor can allow the distant student desktop sharing permissions.) You can also archive presentations and post those for students to view at another time.
8. Blackboard - I like putting all my course materials in one place (even if they are just links to other web-based resources.) Students know to look there first before contacting me.
9. Adobe Acrobat Professional - I use this because our university supplies it, but I show students free PDF tools (like CutePDF Writer)

10. PowerPoint - You can't get away from PowerPoint... (I encourage the use of Impress in OpenOffice.org, but Breeze does not allow me to convert Impress files to Breeze files.)