One of the hottest sessions at ISTE 2010 this year was the annual free tools smack-down hosted by SIGMS. Here are a few of the sites that we found particularly interesting:

The Week In Rap - http://theweekinrap.com/ - provides a free weekly summary of current events in a hip-hop music video for teens and students.

Tagxedo - http://www.tagxedo.com/ - turns text into a visually stunning tag cloud.

Google Search Stories - http://www.youtube.com/searchstories - lets you turn Google searches into video stories. All you have to do is enter some search terms, pick the music and let YouTube do the rest.

Voki - http://www.voki.com/ - a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them for your classroom.

ZooBurst - http://alpha.zooburst.com/- a digital storytelling tool that is designed to let anyone easily create their own customized 3D pop-up books.

Xtranormal - http://www.xtranormal.com/ - allows users to quickly bring characters to life with drag-and-drop animation.

Gale Apps - http://www.gale.cengage.com/apps/ - access library resources using GPS to find public libraries within a 10-mile radius of the user's location, or access your school library's Gale online resources.

Pulse for iPad- http://www.alphonsolabs.com/ - provides a visually appealing newsreader that renders stories from multiple sources on a dynamic mosaic interface.

Garfield teaches Internet safety - http://www.infinitelearninglab.org/ - Professor Garfield offers the lesson and then shows children how to apply them.

Live Binders - http://livebinders.com/ - makes it easy to organize and present your resources quickly and simply.

Wordia - http://www.wordia.com/ - is a unique way for users to explore the personal connotation of words through video.