Doodle - A free web based service to help schedule meetings for your team.
Google Docs - Collaborative document work and sharing is easier with these apps.
Gimp and Inkscape are free alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator
Sketchup is an incredibly easy to use 3D layout package, great for blocking out spaces and playing with ideas quickly.
Freemind and XMind are free mind-mapping packages. Incredibly useful for brainstorming, plotting out possibilities and connections.
Some other great places on the web:
Mayang's Texture Library (and many more exist in Google's index...)
Flickr (Academic fair use allows you to use pictures from here as part of an academic presentation)
If you want to go deeper in the future, Blender is a free full-featured 3D modelling package with a built in game engine, but it's not a quick learn. Adventure Game Studio is a great package for building old school 2D point and clickers like Lucasarts used to make.
The following sites are great resources for news from the gaming world:
Kotaku, Destructoid and Gamasutra.
