A former professor of mine shared a link the other day to a wiki on wikispaces.com with an amazing running list of 21st century tools.  I’ve long been a fan of lists of great tools and this one did not fail to impress!  What impressed me more was the fact that I had only heard of a small fraction of the tools on the list (I’d better get with it!).

From what I could see, the majority of the tools seem to be free.  They fall into the following categories:

Audio | Bookmarking | Charts/Graphs | Digital Art | Digital Storytelling | File Conversion | File Sharing | Misc. | Photo Editing | Presentation/Slideshow | Project Management | Search Engines | Social Networks | Suvey/Polls | Timelines | WebQuests | Word Processing | Video/Screencasting

The obvious uses here are related to education, but I can see just about any member of the digital race finding something to simplify (or complicate) their day.  While I haven’t quite had the time to experiment with every tool, here are some of the gems in my opinion:

• Myna - finally a PC substitute for Garage Band, though not quite as full featured.  Still worth a look!
  
  
• Text to Mindmap - A deceiving simple tool that makes great mind maps for visual thinkers and learners.  You can see by the example below how you can take a basic outline and turn it into an idea or content web.
  
• PaperRater - Free alternative to Turnitin.com.  Again, not quite as feature-rich as the paid sites, but feeding a piece of writing into it will give you a full report on what the site thinks of your spelling, grammar, word choice, and writing mechanics.  Good first stop for students (and bloggers) to get a quick checkup on their writing.
  

Hope you check out the wiki and find something useful!