Tools for development

Freely available tools that you can use to develop your communication resources

4 min readOct 30, 2020

In this post, we look at some of the freely available tools that you can use to develop your communication resources. This list is not exhaustive but should give you plenty to explore. Most of the resources are from 1minuteCPD**. Each post will only take you a minute to watch or read and it’s designed to generate ideas and introduce you to lots of different tools.

** Please note that some of the videos from 1minuteCPD may be out of date as they can be up to 4 years old.

Presentations
Infographics
Posters
Free images and audio to use in your resource
Videos
Animations
Websites
Apps
Making your resource available to a wider audience
Adding a QR code to your resource
Other apps that may be useful

1. Presentations

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is king when it comes to presentations. It is very easy to use but also very versatile. If you create a PowerPoint online using your Office365 account, then you will be able to collaborate on the presentation together. It’s likely that most of you will be quite skilled in using PowerPoint, but here are a few tips that might be useful if you decide to use PowerPoint to create your resource:

#106 Get a perfect colour match in PowerPoint

#158 Embedding videos into PowerPoint

#230 Animate your PowerPoints: Motion paths

#25 Convert your PowerPoint presentations to PDF

#357 Add a moving GIF image to your PowerPoint

#369 Worried your PowerPoints aren’t accessible? Get some help!

#48 Create a template for your PowerPoint slides

#512 PowerPoint Online: Design Ideas

#528 Re-arranging PowerPoint Layers for Object Transitions

2. Infographics

Infographics are a great way to present information with lots of data and could be a great format for your resource. Here are some tools you could explore

#163 Infographics and Visual Ideas with Easelly

#224 Infogram [1/2]: Visualise data

#551 Flourish: Data Visualisation & Storytelling

Other infographic tools: Piktochart

3. Posters

Posters are a good way to convey information. Canva is a good app to explore and has lots of design options and templates:

Canva

#444 Canva: A quick & easy way to create beautiful designs

#518 Export your Canva presentations to PowerPoint

#552 Canva: Quickly add Pixabay images to your project

If you wanted to mock-up a poster, you could use Adobe Comp (#167 Design and create with Adobe Comp).

4. Free images and audio to use in your resource

Here is a useful list to help you find free images and audio to use in your resource

#183 Using free music in your videos and presentations

#64 How to find Creative Commons photographs on Flickr

#6 Change your Google image settings for only images labelled for reuse

#289 The Noun Project: Free, high-quality icons for your projects

#349 Make a splash with Unsplash

#559 Pixabay: Free stock video footage and clips

#589 Free medical images with SMART

#590 Create professional science figures with BioRender

#588 Flaticon: Over 3 million free icons!

#584 Need Icons? Use PowerPoint!

Editing images

If you need to edit images, these are some free alternatives to Photoshop

#264 Not got Photoshop but need to tweak an image? Try Pixlr.com

#560 Pixlr X: Resize images quickly online

#563 Pixlr X: Crop images quickly online

#554 Free Photoshop editing with Photopea

#408 Quick graphics using Adobe Spark

5. Videos

Creating a video can be a very effective resource and easily shared with others. There are lots of different options to record to choose from. The FBMH elearning team have put together a list of video recording and editing resources that you can access.

Recording videos

#2 Podcast your PowerPoints!

#62 Screencastify: Easily record your screen using Google Chrome

#585 Loom [1/2]: An introduction to a free screen and video recording software

#275 iMovie for iOS [1/3]: An overview

#640 Canva: Create a talking head video presentation

Editing videos

#513 Online video editing with WeVideo

6. Animations

Animations can be a powerful way to convey a message. These are some free tools that you could use to create your resource.

#217 An introduction to Explee

#115 Explain Everything: Screencasting and interactive whiteboards simplified

#482 Renderforest for free funky animation creation

#457 Giphy: Animate your images

Other animation tools: Powtoon

7. Websites

You may want to create a website for your resource. Here are some ideas to get you started:

#423 Web page with Adobe Spark

#539 Getting started with Google Sites

Other website tools: Weebly, Wix.com

8. Apps

You may decide that you want to create an app. Although you won’t have time to create an app you can create a mockup using Mockflow — #566 Free Mockups with Mockflow