ClassTools.net - Free Flash for Online Teaching

So it has been quite a few months since I was last inspired enough to talk about something on this blog. However, I was going through my list of new Twitter followers today (again, something I have not done in a few months) and found http://twitter.com/russeltarr, who is a history teacher in Toulouse, France, and who developed the ClassTools.net website. According to Russel:

• Classtools.net provides free, customisable flash templates to embed into blogs, wikis and websites. There is no signup, no passwords, no charges...

This is very cool for anyone who teaches online or has a class website. Russel has created 17 templates that are available for teachers to fill in the blanks and images. Some are interactive games, others are fill in the blanks. Students can save their work, which is saved for 12 months on the Classtools.net website.

As an example, the Venn Diagram template allows the teacher to fill in as much of the diagram as they want -- they could be questions, for example -- and provide instructions in a side box. Students can enter their name, then follow the directions to create their own venn diagram. They can then save this online and both print it out and copy and save or send the URL for later access and revisions.


The current 17 templates are:

• Arcade Game Generator!
• Flashcard Generator
• Countdown Timer
• Random Name Picker
• Dustbin Game
• Post It
• Diamond 9
• Fishbone (Ishikawa)
• Venn Diagram
• Animated Book
• Timeline
• Lights Out
• Target
• Hamburger
• Living Graph
• Learning Cycle
• Jigsaw Diagram
• Priority Chart
• Source Analyser

Note that the results all have Google ads on the right, and an advertisement for classes offered by the sites author on the bottom.

This is a very useful teaching tool that I plan to try out in my online classes.

Top 5 Quiz Generators for Online Educators

Top 5 Quiz Generators for Online Educators

Building out quizzes for both traditional and online classes can be a time-consuming chore. Luckily, there are now many online "generators" being designed that take much of the work out of online test taking. If you need to create a simple online test, look to the five user-friendly tools below.

1. Exam Builder – With this exam generator, you can create an online test in a Web browser, and then publish it in one click. You can customize each test for online registration and individual retests, plus the site provides an analysis on how your students scored as a whole.

2. Quiz Center – Brought to you by the Discovery Channel, this easy tool will allow you to create, publish and grade quizzes online. This generator is very flexible and, perhaps even more importantly, is free of charge. Teachers should find this tool useful at both the K-12 and college level.

3. Easy Test Maker – Here, you can create a host of different tests at no charge. Your answer options will include multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching, short answer, true or false and more. This robust tool includes a spell check function, as well, which comes in very handy for those of us creating tests late at night.

4. Charles Kelly's Online Quiz Generator – This multiple choice test generator is very popular amongst tech-savvy college instructors. It allows you a lot of freedom in terms of formatting the data.

5. JavaScript QuizMaker – As the name suggests, this is a quiz generator that provides JavaScript that you can cut and paste into your own Web page. If you are operating your own classroom site, this can be an easy way to host a test on your page.

The above tools have proven to be very useful and popular amongst online instructors. Although more complex tools do exist, most teachers are looking for easy-to-use generators to maximize their productivity. These resources will certainly save you time and make online test taking easier on your students.

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This post is by guest blogger, Heather Johnson. Heather Johnson is a regular commentator on the subject of top online universities. She welcomes your feedback and potential job inquiries at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Does Your Department Blog? - Why Not?

@micamonkey recently posted a comment on Twitter.com in which she mentioned that at least three departments at the National University of Singapore (NUS) had department blogs. I asked her who these were and she sent me these three links:

• Sociology Dept. - http://socioblogsg.wordpress.com/
• Biodiversity research group in the Biological Sciences Dept. - http://nusbiodiversity.wordpress.com/
• Industrial Design Program - http://moduleblog.nus.edu.sg/blogs/id4104/default.aspx

The differences among these three blogs is interesting. Here a are screen grabs of their headers along with a few comments from me:


The Sociology blog page is used almost entirely to announce events. Tabs on the blog provide basic static information, like a traditional web 1.0 website.


The Biodiversity research and education group's blog is more diverse than that for Sociology. Blog postings include announcements of an NUS library blog and the promotion of a professor, a job announcement, and several posts linked to news stories about NUS's discovery of a lung-less frog. The "Blogs, et al." link is a substantial list of blogs and online journals associated with research and classes (called "modules" in Singapore) related to the Biological Sciences Dept. More static links go to a list of classes and the student club, which seems to be responsible for this blog.


The Industrial Design program's blog at NUS is called "ID @ NUS" and describes itself as:

This blog serves as a platform to provide design information to industrial design students in the National University of Singapore (NUS). It also serves as a flatform to demonstrate the teaching outcomes in NUS ID programme, in particular, the final year studio and thesis projects.

Most of the current blog posts are about forthcoming design competitions. Unlike the other blogs, there is no static information is provided on the blog site -- at least not yet.

==========

This relatively random selection of three department/program blogs shows the considerable diversity of ways that department can use blogs to keep their students and the general public up to date on their activities. They range from the more social networked engaged to the more straightforward announcements (almost like an email list), and from the more narrow sites to broader information dissemination.

Blogs offer a very easy way (in my opinion) to keep the different populations served by academic departments informed and up to date on department activities. It can supplements the traditional alumni newsletter that is common in the US (I am not sure how common they are elsewhere) with more timely information updates. They can help build alumni support, as well as engage current students and recruit future students. And they can give department accomplishments more exposure both within the university and to the larger public who pay a good part of the budgets of state/government universities.

Blogs also allow for RSS subscriptions, which are widely appreciated and used by those of us who are more into the social software realm. But more importantly, RSS allows these blogs to be re-purposed in other ways across the Internet, thereby giving each blog the potential to reach well beyond the immediate links above, and thereby exposing them to larger audiences. The blogs can be reposted on other websites and subscribed to in RSS readers, such as Google Reader (which is what I use).

So, when @micamonkey wondered in hwer tweet whether or not departments should blog, I think yes, absolutely -- every department should blog. It is possible to set up a group blog that includes most of the faculty and principal administrative staff in a department. It is possible to install "blog this" utilities on their computers so they can quickly and easily post to the blog without needing to go to Wordpress or Blogger.

Despite my own participatory preferences, we might not want all faculty members to have access -- given the politics that can exist in some departments. And, of course, not everyone would want to blog, either. I am a geek and am often considered a little too far into the future by others in my department. In fact, I could imagine general resistance to this whole idea from some people in my department. Despite that, I still think it is a good idea!

(BTW - you can follow me in Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/alew)

Vote / Debate Online Social Networking for Education

The venerable Economist magazine is holding an online debate and poll on the topic of Social Networking for Education.

• Click here to read and cast your vote.

I am obviously in the Pro- camp on this one. Like many Anti-Social Media in Education arguments, the Economist author finds selective shortcomings in different corners of Social Media and paints a broad condemnation of the entire field.

I am using Ning.com in a class this semester at the National University of Singapore and I think it is working great. The class is currently only viewable to the students, but I do plan to open it to world after the semester has ended. (The students will be allowed to edit or remove themselves and their postings before I do that.)

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P.S. - I have not posted anything to this blog in awhile. I guess I have been distracted. Now that I am getting settled in Singapore (just visiting for this semester), hopefully I will get back to some regular posts! -- Alan

Blogging, Creativity and Formal Writing in the University

I highly recommend listening to this interview on ITConversations:

• Interview with Gardner Campbell (English Professor, University of Mary Washington) - on John Udel's Interviews with Innovators podcast

• UMWBlogs - mentioned in the interview

This is an interesting conversation about writing and creativity and how this is important in blogging, online communication, and web-based education. Prof. Campbell makes the case for using online tools to find new ways of learning and communicating about ourselves and our world. He makes some interesting comments. One that I like is how writing public blogs is something that students will carry with them after they graduate. I have been trying to get this idea across in my classes (most of which have some public social media presence), though not quite as concisely as Prof. Campbell did.

While I have no background in the arts, I think I agree that literature and the arts need to be free of boundaries. However, I believe that the sciences require a formal knowledge foundation, including formal forms of communication. Only then can creative insights expand the boundaries of our knowledge.

I agree with his comments that social media requires some new writing skills, and that this new medium can generate creative and new depths of communication. But as the editor of an academic journal in the social sciences, I think there is a necessary role for teaching formal rules -- especially writing. Even Wikipedia is trying to get its articles written in a more formal and academic manner.

Unfortunately, there are few more frustrating challenges for me than the poor writing ability of many of my students. If they cannot write a coherent sentence and paragraph (let alone a whole paper), then they will not be able to effectively communicate in the real world when they graduate. You cannot gain professional respect unless you are able to write to the level of your professional peers. And I am always wonder just what my students are being taught in those required English classes that they take.

Finally, I agree with his chagrin over a computer system designed to automatically grade essay exams -- and its tie to a textbook publisher. At the same time, as a former department chair in a publicly funded teaching university, I am aware of the demand from state legislators for faculty to teach as many students as possible in the most efficient manner possible. Departments that do not play the game risk the loss of faculty positions and degree programs.

Structure vs Agency

I think that there has always been a tension between structure and creativity in education (e.g., the old "structure vs agency" debate). I see it in the kindergarten classes that my wife used to teach, and I have seen it on graduate research committees. I think that the reason why the US higher education system has been so successful is because this tension is recognized and accepted, if not always appreciated (physical sciences are always better funded than social sciences and the arts).

It should be no surprise that these same tensions arise in the use of social media tools in education. To me, social software is a tool. How it is used is up to the instructor. Many of the the potential uses of social software actually evolve out of collaborative learning and student-centered learning, on which many books have been written in the past several decades, and from which those of use who teach mostly online have a wealth of knowledge to draw upon.

So anyway, it was a thought provoking interview -- and one that took me away from an encyclopedia article that I am working on, that is already past-due to the editors!

NAU Technology Faculty Survey - Google Doc's Presentation

This is a short presentation that I am giving in a couple of hours. I created it with the Google Docs presentation tool, which works fairly well. I just wish there was an off-line version, just in case the Internet goes down just before my presentation time!

NEW: Note in the Comments that is is possible to save the presentation as an HTML file (with supporting folders) on your computer, which then allows you to show the presentation offline using any browser.

Click the Title Above to Start the Presentation.

Web 2.0 Cool for School - on the DownloadSquad Blog

DownloadSquad has a list of 15 mostly free online applications to make student life easier for this coming school year. Categories include Communication, Office Apps, Note Taking and Sharing, Organizing and Scheduling, and Making Money. Also see the comments section for other apps and topics not covered in the main blog.

RELATED TO THIS is nedwolf.com's list of Best Free Web Applications - also very useful for students and teaching.

AND - FOR PARENTS - Now you can Help your student write their term papers with Google Docs. - from the WSJ - via the Adult Education and Technology Blog

Twitter Tweets for Higher Education

I love Twitter.com. I usually post a couple of items a day, on average, and tend to follow and interact others who also post in a moderate fashion. Some people post dozens of twits a day and use Twitter as a kind of instant messaging client. I see, and use it, more as a mini-blog. When I click on my name, I see all my posts, which is a sort of summary of things that I do and think about that I want to share with others.

For the uninitiated, Twitter limits you to 140 characters and spaces per post (or per "tweet"). You can follow others Twitter uses on your home page. The graphic above is a snapshot of my Twitter homepage, showing three of the people whose Tweets I follow. They also follow me, though that is not necessary. To see all my posts, go to my Twitter page at: http://twitter.com/alew.

I actually had not considered it as a tool for education until I saw a link posted by Twittown to a blog post on that subject. Doing a little online searching (emphasis on the little), I found the following items related to Twitter and education.

1- Using Twitter with your students on Doug Belshaw's teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk blog - emphasizes secondary education. Doug says:

• I think Twitter could be ideal for reminding students about homework, trips and such things, especially as they can enter their mobile phone number to be alerted when one of their ‘friends’ updates their account. The advantage is that you don’t need to know the phone numbers of students to get messages onto their device: they are the ones who authorize their mobile phone from the website and they subscribe to your Twitter feed.

2- The Educause 7 Things You Should Series on the EdVentures in Technology blog - The list is a lot longer than 7 items now. A PDF summary of Twitter was added in July 2007. The summary points out three potential uses of Twitter: (1) as a communications tool for collaborating researchers; (2) As a way to get students to focus in a concise (140 words) way on a topic; and (3) As a way for conference attendees to discuss topics, again in a concise manner.

3- Reference services and Twitter on the Digital Reference blog - Stephen Francoeur cites a couple of examples and suggests that libraries could advertise a Twitter address which people could "follow" to learn about library events, new books, and other announcements. Twitter could also be used to announce responses to library user questions, which might be answered in greater length on a linked webpage.

For a couple more library examples of this, see

• - Twitter Update or how I was able to exploit the latest social networking site without really trying on the Gather No Dust Blog.
• - Twitter and the Missouri River Regional Library
  

4- A Guide to Twitter in Libraries on the iLibrarian blog - This is a resource site, broken into the categories of :

• How to Use it
• How Libraries are Using it
• Library Twitter Accounts
• Twitter Tools & Mashups
• Twitter Alternatives

Like many Web 2.0 tools, librarians are at the forefront of Twitter use. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps social media is just more core to their work and mission. Or perhaps they just have more time that do classroom teachers. Or perhaps I just did not search deep enough to find teachers using Twitter. Whatever the reason, there are lessons for classroom and online teachers from these sites. These include:

1. Twitter is very easy to sign-up for and to use
2. Twitter is an effective communication tool for concise messages and news items, or links to longer messages and news items
   
3. Twitter is fun to use and may, therefore, be effective in engaging students in discussions who do not need to write longer essays

There are some interesting Twitter tools (also see #4 above), that students might find of interest, though they tend to not be as easy to use as Twitter.

You can set your Twitter account private ("Protect My Updates") or public. This is changeable in the Settings section. With a private account, your posts are only available to other Twitters who you specifically approve to follow you. This is probably the preferred approach for most classroom situations.

If your account is public, anything that is posted by you on Twitter can be "followed" any any other Twitter member in the world, and indeed is posted to super sites, such as the Twitter Public Timeline and Twittervision, for everyone to see. This, of course, presents privacy issues for students. I personally think that can be dealt with for university students by warning them and encouraging anonymity and thoughtful postings.

A growing issue is a kind of Twitter Spam. There are some Twitter users whose goal seems to be to follow as many people as possible. How can one possibly follow 10,000 people? They do this simply to get others to visit their Twitter site and then click on links that will take them to a different website (some of which may not be safe). When they follow you, anyone who is interested in see who your followers are will see their link. It is easy to permanently "block" these people, which you can do when you click on the list of people who are following you.

So Twitter is basically a potential alternative to email, instant messaging and discussion forums, as ways of communicating with students. And because it is fun to use, I may give it a try in my next class -- after my current sabbatical. By then, however, Twitter may be old hat, replaced by something else.

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NEW (28Sept 07): Steve Dembo's Teach42 blog has an interesting post titled "What I learned from Twitter Today" which gives yet another interesting perspective on the use of Twitter in education.

NEW (29Jan 08): Twitter for Academia - list of uses of Twitter in a university class based on actual experience.

NEW (8May 08): Academic Research page on the Twitter Fan Wiki site. - not much there yet, but if we can get the word out, perhaps it will grow.

NEW (9Jun08): Twitter for Librarians: The Ultimate Guide - these ideas are not just for librarians - includes a list of about a dozen library twitter blogs

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom

This is an article at ComputerWorld.com. From the article:

"In one Boston College professor's classroom, however, wikis have become a primary learning tool, replacing textbooks and allowing improved collaboration among students. The wiki is even used to let students submit possible questions for examinations, many of which actually appear on tests."

Anyone who attends the annual Educause.edu conferences on a regular basis knows that this is not a first. However, it is an interesting article and shows how wikis can be used to replace textbooks.

Top eLearning Tools - - Survey Results

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, in Somerset, England has an ongoing survey in which they are asking eLearning professionals to list their "Top 10 Tools." This is being compiled in a Top 100 Tools website.

Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed in the list. First, I was surprised to see Firefox topping the list and Google Search in the #3 spot, and wondered how people are using Firefox and Google Search in their teaching assignments. I was also surprised to see and Microsoft Word on the list, but then realized that these are not Web 2.0 tools.

However, when you click on the tool to see the comments made by the respondents, you quickly learn that these are actually the Top 10 personal productivity tools of the respondents. In that sense, I basically agree with the list. It is not, however, as useful readers of this blog as I had initially hoped. Though, it does give some insight into the views of the eLearning and tech support people that those of us who are teaching online occasionally come into contact with.

AND - The survey is still open so you can add your own votes and comments on your "Top 10 Tools." So go to the Top 100 Tools list and cast your votes.

Below is a list of the top 15 tools (as of when I am posting this blog, it will likely change over time). I have highlighted in Bold/Red the ones that I consider the most obvious teaching tools that you can build an online class assignments around. (This does not include tools where you are just teaching students how to use the technology, like Powerpoint, Word, Audacity and others would be.)

1 Firefox
2 del.icio.us
3 Google Search
4 Gmail
5 Google Reader + Skype
7 PowerPoint
8 Blogger + WordPress
10 Bloglines
11 Google Docs & Spreadsheets
12 Word
13 iGoogle + Audacity
15 Dreamweaver + flickr + Ning + Wikispace

Podcast + Powerpoint = Slidecast Mashup

I mentioned Slidshare.net before -- it is a website where you can upload and share Powerpoint presentations. I have uploaded a few of my presentations, and have marked a few others as favorites.

Now, Slidshare.net has introduced "Slidecasts." Slidecasts are mashups of audio files and uploaded Powerpoint presentations. This is kind of like what Camtasia (Techsmith.com) does on your computer, and what can be done with Garage Band for audio podcasts.

Camtasia Studio creates a recording that includes both audio and synchronized video that is captured from your computer's microphone and screen. Camtasia is mostly used to capture the combined Powerpoint presentation and audio presentation for making training videos and capturing lectures. Output can be edited and saved in a variety of different format, including Flash. (Tegrity.com also offers a similar application, with searchable files that are stored on the Tegrity server.) The Apple computer program, Garage Band, allows you to attach photos and images to segments of an existing audio, or podcast, file. The result is in a proprietory format that is only viewed on Apple's Video iPods and on the Quicktime player on PCs and Macs. It is mostly used for creating "enhanced podcasts."

Slideshare's Slidecast requires that you have two things: (1) a Powerpoint presentation that has been uploaded to Slideshare.net [ppt, pps, opd, and pdf formats all will work], and (2) an MP3 audio file that is accessible somewhere on the Internet -- on a webpage or on a blog. (There are some free audio/podcast sites that might work for this, such as Gcast.com.) Slidecast is nice online application that allows you to mashup these two files by moving slide transitions to any point on the audio file.

The resulting Slidecast is very slick and can be viewed on the Slideshare.net website, or the code can be copies to place it on a blog or other website for viewing. Examples can be found on the Slideshare.net homepage, where a Slidecast of the Day is highlighted.

I have never used Camtasia, mostly because of the cost (I like free things). I do, however, record my lectures and presentations, which I sometimes use to create podcasts, and I lecture with Powerpoint slides. Slidecasting looks like something that I will definitely enhance the online learning of my student.

From the Slideshare.net website: "Slidecasting is a new multimedia format for viewing slide decks synchronized with an audio file. It is for conference talks, musical slideshows, audio picture books or whatever else you can imagine. It's really easy to create one, so get started now!"

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NEW (30 Aug 07): I created my first Slidecast today. It was incredibly easy! Check it out here.

NEW (3 Sept 07): Edublogs.org has posted instructions for embedding Slideshare Slidecasts, and a couple of other slide show products, in your blogs: http://edublogs.org/embedding-slideshows-and-other-flash-stuff-in-your-blog/

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Teaching With Web 2.0 - conference paper

Click on the title above, or try here, to download the MS Word file for a paper titled:

Social Software in Tourism, Event Management and Tourism Education

that I recently presented at the 3rd Tourism Outlook Conference in conjunction with the Global Events Congress II, 16-18 July 2007, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The Event Management section is rather weak, as I added that mostly for the conference theme. In addition, I wrote this for the conference proceedings, so there are no references cited. I mostly just wanted to get it out for people to see and use. A more formal version will be submitted to an journal some day (which means it would not be out for a couple of years).

The core of the paper recounts my experiment and experience using Web 2.o teaching tools in an online class on Sustainable Tourism in the Spring 2007 semester at Northern Arizona University.

Digital Urban Blog: Universities using Second Life? Don't believe the hype

In an interesting post, Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith in the Digital Urban Blog writes:

"To be honest its hard enough to get academics to write blogs – even by those in the realms of Internet based research – Second Life it seems is still a step too far for many."

I agree with this statement. As intellectually compelling as the concept of MMOW* teaching is, in my own minimal ventures into Second Life, I found that it took far too much effort for me, let along my far more technologically-challenged students, than it is currently worth. Reports from those using Second Life at my university (Northern Arizona University) are the same -- a lot of effort on the teacher's part, and a major challenge for their students. These barriers could change in the future, of course, but for most teachers in the trenches that future is quite a ways off.

*Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds

[Digital Urban is written by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, aimed at examining the latest techniques to visualise the city scape via digital media it covers a lot of the work going on at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London.]

Read/WriteWeb.com's list of Web 2.0 Apps for Students

The popular Read/WriteWeb Blog has posted a fairly long list of Web 2.0 tools for students. Many of them have been covered in Web 2.0 Teaching Tools in the past, but there are also quite a few that I have not reviewed. In particular, I have always been a bit skeptical of the value of online Notetaking and Mindmapping applications. But from the comments to the Read/Write Web blog, I guess there are students who use and like them.

Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students

University Librarians Emotionally Debate Web 2.0

From: The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: 'Everyone's Tripping and It's All Free':

Calling upon Mr. Lanier’s notion of “digital Maoism,” Michael Gorman, the former president of the American Library Association, depicts Web 2.0 as “an unholy brew made up of the digital utopianism that hailed the Internet as the second coming of Haight-Ashbury — everyone’s tripping and it’s all free.”

Mr. Gorman's stinging critique of the undermining of academic authority by user generated Web 2.0 (e.g., Wikipedia) is met by equally stinging responses and discussions by blogger librarians. Links can be found in the original article, or here:

• Two posts on Britannica Blog by Michael Gorman
• Jaron Lanier, who previously expressed similar concerns in a much-discussed essay
• Two Academic bloggers have challenge Mr. Gorman’s arguements

iTunes Store Opens a Special Portal for University Content

from: The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: iTunes Opens a Special Section for Free Collegiate Content

"Today the iTunes store unveiled its new iTunes U portal, a spot on the site that will collect college lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost. ... The new portal should make it much easier for shoppers to happen upon collegiate content. The store’s home page now features a link to the special iTunes U section, and recordings offered through iTunes U now show up in search results."

Using Social Software in Online and Hybrid Classes

| View | Upload your own

This is the Audio and Powerpoint of the presentation that I gave today about my experience using social software (blogs, wikis, podcasts, and website creation) in an online class this last semester.

The audio is located on my Geography for Travelers podcast. The Powerpoint slides are hosted for viewing and downloading at: http://www.slideshare.net/alew/

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Note that this version of the Powerpoint presentation is slightly different from the audio file. There are a couple of slides at the start and at the end that were not in the presentation when the audio was recorded, and there is one slide at the end that I mention (very briefly) that is not in the slidecast. --- Long story....

Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators - eBook

TeachingHacks.com provides a free and very interesting eBook titled:

"Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators: A Guide to RSS and More"
by Quentin d'souza

Download the PDF book here

and go to the blog page that supports the book here

The guide is designed for K-12 educators, but with the current state of Web 2.0 in Higher Education (very limited in my view), I do not think there is really that much difference.

Here are two chapter from the Table of Contents:


IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED

• SOCIAL BOOKMARKING AND RSS
• WHAT IS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING?
• HOW IT WORKS?
• BLOGGING AND RSS
• WHAT IS A BLOG?
• COMMENTS IN BLOGS
• WIKIS AND RSS
• WHAT IS A WIKI?
• SHARING RSS FEEDS
• PHOTO SHARING AND RSS
• WHAT IS PHOTO SHARING?
• HOW IT WORKS

MORE IDEAS

• SHARING LEARNING OBJECT’S
• K-12 Learning Objects Shared Through RSS
• CLASS AND SCHOOL INFORMATION
• TRACK DISCUSSIONS

EDUCATIONAL PODCAST DIRECTORIES

EDUCATIONAL PODCAST DIRECTORIES

Here is a list of directories to educational podcasts. Educational podcasts range from university classes, to elementary school news, and from pay-per-download ebooks to free DIY (do it yourself) tutorials. All of these are worth checking out.

Learn On The Go - Nice, clean interface; Nice organized list of university podcasts; Designed for general public interest

Learn Out Loud - Includes a lot of pay-per-download audio books mixed in with the free stuff -- made it somewhat confusing to me; Designed for general public interest

Podcast Directory for Educators, Schools and Colleges - More educator and school-oriented (all levels) than the those above, though also includes professional training and learning about podcasting.

The Education Podcast Network - Podcasts are listed by academic discipline so they can be used in classrooms and for home schooling. This one is the most school-oriented of these four directories.

Open Culture: University Podcast Collection - A listing of links to university websites where podcasts can be found, with xome comments on what is available. (I reviewed this site in more detail previously.)

Theory and Practice of Online Learning

Theory and Practice of Online Learning - Free eBook from Athabasca University.

Here is the TOC (table of contents), because practice really works best when supported by theory:

Part 1 • Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery

1 Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning - Mohamed Ally
2 Toward a Theory of Online Learning - Terry Anderson
3 Value Chain Analysis: A Strategic Approach to Online Learning - Fathi Elloumi

Part 2 • Infrastructure and Support for Content Development

4 Developing an Infrastructure for Online Learning - Alan Davis
5 Technologies of Online Learning (e-Learning) - Rory McGreal & Michael Elliott
6 Media Characteristics and Online Learning Technology - Patrick J. Fahy

Part 3 • Design and Development of Online Courses

7 The Development of Online Courses - Dean Caplan
8 Developing Team Skills and Accomplishing Team Projects Online - Deborah C. Hurst & Janice Thomas
9 Copyright Issues in Online Courses: A Moment in Time - Lori-Ann Claerhout
10 Value Added—The Editor in Design and Development of Online Courses - Jan Thiessen & Vince Ambrock

Part 4 • Delivery, Quality Control, and Student Support of Online Courses

11 Teaching in an Online Learning Context - Terry Anderson
12 Call Centers in Distance Education - Andrew Woudstra, Colleen Huber, & Kerri Michalczuk
13 Supporting Asynchronous Discussions among Online Learners - Joram Ngwenya, David Annand & Eric Wang
14 Library Support for Online Learners: e-Resources, e-Services, and the Human Factors - Kay Johnson, Houda Trabelsi, & Tony Tin
15 Supporting the Online Learner - Judith A. Hughes
16 The Quality Dilemma in Online Education - Nancy K. Parker

This book is released under the Creative Commons copyright (attribution, noncommercial, no derivatives).

FlatPlanet Wiki - International Collaborative Wiki Example

The FlatPlanet Wiki (on Wikispaces.com) is a collaboration between a secondary class in Canada and one in the UK. The students worked together to create a series or projects that deal with Environmental Issues.

The site includes a useful set of ground rule that would be helpful to anyone wanting to setup a similar wiki project.

Nice job, kids!

BTW - I used Wikispaces, myself, this past semester as part of a class on Sustainable Tourism. I think Wikispaces is the best out there for class use -- especially from a teacher's perspective.

Earth Observatory Reference: Global Warming

Earth Observatory Reference: Global Warming

Not really Web 2.0, but this is a Great New Resource from NASA on how scientists develop global climate models and predict the impacts of global warming.

(See if you can find the photo I took that they found on my Flickr account.)

MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

MERLOT = Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

MERLOT is the probably the largest social network for sharing educational resources in higher education. At the time that I am writing this, the site claimed to have 16,566 Materials (learning materials and assignments), and 45,057 members (faculty, students, librarians, and others).

The website is divided into the following sections:

		Learning Materials Browse peer reviewed online learning materials in your discipline.
		Colleagues Find expert colleagues in your discipline.
		Personal Collections View personal collections from people in your discipline.
		Assignments Get assignments you can use with your students.
		Guest Experts Find guest experts in the Virtual Speakers Bureau.

The Learning Materials is probably the most useful. The list is created by users who basically link to material that they have placed on their own websites. I looked at some of the Editor's Choice material, which I found to be quite good. Despite the large number of members and materials, not a whole lot came up when I typed in my discipline of geography, and nothing came up when I typed in my specialization of Tourism.

MERLOT is ike many other things on the web with the categories of Information Technology and Business being most prominent, while the Arts and Social Sciences are least represented. In addition, because the material is linked to off-site webpages, I would be concerned that some material will disappear over time -- a problem that I have regularly had to deal with in my online classes over the years.

That being said, I am a new member of MERLOT and hopefully I will be able to both use and contriute material to it in the future.

Wired Campus Blog: Virtual Island Fosters Educational Innovation

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Virtual Island Fosters Educational Innovation:

"On May 16, the new island will make its debut in Second Life, the interactive virtual world. Built to foster collaboration in the higher-education community, the site -- a joint effort of the software developer Angel Learning and the Second Life Educators community (SLED) -- is a place for educators new to virtuality to figure out how things are done. Teaming up to tear down a campus and redesign it is one possible use."

How Many Students Are Just Right in a Web Course?

How Many Students Are Just Right in a Web Course?

"In one university engineering program, an additional $150 per student was added to a faculty salary for every distance learning student — plus an additional $50 per student goes to the department’s budget. At a state university, faculty teaching distance learning courses received a $100 bonus for each student once the enrollment exceeded 25. In another example, in a library information program on the east coast, faculty received an additional $50 per out—of—state student enrolled in the course." ( Copyright Judith V. Boettcher, 1997-2007)

This article is actually a decade old, though it has apparently been updated over time... -- Alan

Japan's First Internet University Goes Online

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Japan's First Internet University Goes Online

Japan’s first entirely Internet-based university opened last weekend with a real-time entrance ceremony Webcast to the PC’s of its 1,200 freshmen students and a promise to shake up the country’s moribund higher-education sector.

SlideShare.net - The Joys of Powerpoint!

I always use Powerpoint for my presentations (there are no alternatives), and after almost every conference presentation that I have made in recent years, I have had students asking me for a copy of the Powerpoint file. This is especially true in Asia, where students must have gigabytes of .ppt files on their computers. When this first started happening, I was wary of giving my work away, but now I pretty much let anyone who wants to make a copy -- life is too short to worry about it!

SlideShare.net is website where people can upload their Powerpoint presentations (also works with Open Office and PDF files) to share with the world. This is sort of Youtube for slide presentations. While it is not as entertaining as Youtube (I can waste a lot of time there!), there are gems of information that can be useful for teaching purposes. For those interested in emerging elearning, for example, there are a bunch of presentations about Second Life, several of which focus exclusively on it use in education.

A wide variety of topics are covered by the presentations, and some are approaching 1000 views (probably more by the time many people read this). I uploaded one of my presentations (on "Travel 2.0", below), which I think is a pretty good one. However, many (if not most) of the others are of questionable value. Also, there are a lot of Spanish language presentations that are not easily filtered out (since I do not know any Spanish at all). As a result, it takes a lot of digging to find the gems in this collection -- at least if you are looking for something specific. If not, then just browsing can be fun, just like Youtube!



Click Here to view my presentation in the image above.

"Making Wikipedia Better" - Class Assignment

This comes from The Wired Campus blog and email newsletter (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 March 07), where you can also follow the discussion.

"Nicola Pratt, a lecturer in international relations at the University of East Anglia, in England, tells The Guardian that she was once one of those "disgruntled" academics who berate students for using Wikipedia in their essays. But then Ms. Pratt had an epiphany: Instead of complaining to her students, why not recruit them to make Wikipedia better? The lecturer is now asking her graduate students to edit eight Wikipedia articles -- on contentious topics related to the politics of the Middle East -- and to make them more balanced. Ms. Pratt has also told students they must create a new article of their own. One hopes students' grades won 't be dependent on articles making it intact through Wikipedia's rough-and-tumble editing process. "

Personally, I think think this is a great idea, especially for a small seminar-like class of seniors or graduate students where not only can content be expanded, but sticky issues of knowledge and epistomology and the role of science and social science in society can be explored.

Second Life University

Universities register for virtual future | CNET News.com

According to this article on CNET News, "more than 70 universities have built island campuses in Second Life."

I think there is one known faculty member here at Northern Arizona University who is just barely starting to play with Second Life -- but not teaching. And if any of my students want to use Second Life for their final project this semester, they are welcome to do that. For me, it is hard enough to find time to sleep in my first life, let along to spend a lot of time on a second one.

That being said, I did sign up for the Second Life Educator's email list, and I was amazed and pleased to see the educational resources that Linden Labs is providing to encourage teaching in their virtual world. Maybe I need to find something in my first life to give up so I can explore Second Life more....

(The image above comes from this SLurl - "Second Live URL.")

Open Culture: University Podcast Collection

Stanford U. and UC Berkeley have gotten quite a lot of media coverage through their affiliation with Apple's iTunes U and Google Video to put audio and video podcasts of lectures up on the Internet. However, there are a lot more universities that are podcasting themselves in different ways to their students and the world.

The Open Culture Blog has put together a comprehensive list of university-sponsored podcasts. These are podcasts that are often accessible through some university (or other institutions of higher education) website portal. Business school podcasts are listed on a separate page.

Open Culture does not list independent university podcasts, such as my Geography for Travelers podcast, which supports my classes, but is not run through my university. Although the Open Culture blog has a more general list of podcasts, they are more culture than education-related.

More comprehensive directories of educational podcasts, covering K-12 and higher education, can be found at:

• Educational Podcast Directories
  
  

Formatpixel - Serious Online Graphic Publishing

Formatpixel is allows you to create gorgeous high resolution, page-folding, online magazines, similar to the Latitudes travel magazine our of Italy. This would be a wonderful tool for a graphic arts class to get their feet wet with quality online publishing. The list of online editing tools includes the following:

Editor (WYSIWYG)
- Insert pages
- Use the Spread Planner to arrange the order of, add and delete pages
- Layer objects on your pages in front of and behind one another
- Apply colour to your pages
- Apply background colours to your project
- Utilise the snap-to-grid functions and alignment helpers
- Upload your own images with the built in image library [ see Image object ]

Text objects
- Change font face
- Change font colour
- Change font style [ normal, bold, italic ]
- Change font alignment [ left, centered or right justified ]
- Change the background colour
- Add drop shadow
- Change the kerning [ spacing between letters ]
- Change the leading [ spacing between lines ]

Media objects
- Import your own JPG, GIF or PNG [ including support for transparency ] files
- Import FLV Video files
- Create your own formatpixel image library
- Edit the names of your images or delete them
- Crop your images
- Add blending modes to images
- Apply colour filters [ normal, greyscale or sepia ]
- Apply a customisable blur effect
- Scale object

Shape objects
- Change shape [ square or circle ]
- Change shapes colour
- Add blending modes to your shapes

There is a free account option, though it is limited to only one project at a maximum of 512k -- which will not get you many pages, but should be enough to introduce students to the concept of virtual magazines. Paid accounts go up to 20 UKPounds for 20 projects and 20MB of storage.

Tourism and Social Software Class at NAU

I have added Social Media to my Spring 2007 class, "Planning for Sustainable Tourism". The class is taught 100% online. Hopefully I will not overwhelm the more technologically challenged students in the class! Click on the title above to go to the current version of the class overview. Registration information can be NAU Distance Learning.

OVERVIEW of PL 376 for Spring 2007
- January 16 - May 11, 2007

Click here for Syllabus

Topic Groups: Each student will be assigned to one of the following three groups at the start of the semester. Students will be given the opportunity to switch groups later in the semester. The Final Project will be related to the topic of the group. A couple of sample topics for each group is shown below.

1. Sustainable Tourism and Money
   • Promoting Destinations and Sustainability Online
   • Monetizing Sustainable Travel and Tourism Websites, Blogs and Podcasts
2. Sustainable Tourism and the Environment
   • Social Networking for the Environment
   • Online Environmental Education
3. Sustainable Tourism and Community (Physical and Digital)
   • Online Citizen Participation / Political Activism
   • Virtual Communities and Real Communities

CLASS SCHEDULE - Please See the LEARNING MODULES and CALENDAR for Actual Assignments and Due Dates

This Schedule is Under Construction, though it will probably not change much.

Week		Points
Module 1 - Intro to Class, Sustainability, and Social Media
1-2	Class Intro Assignment: Tourism Development Issues	75
3	Sustainable Development and Tourism	75
4	Social Media and Tourism	75
5	Planners and Planning for Tourism	75
6	Sustainable Tourism, Planning and Social Media	75
7	Midterm Exam #1	100
Module 2 - Tourism Impacts (using collaborative blogs)
8	Economic Impacts of Tourism	75
9	Social Impacts of Tourism	75
10	Environmental Impacts of (and on) Tourism	75
11	Topic Group Wiki Projects: Resources for Manging Tourism Impacts, Greening the Tourism Economy, or Tourism Planning for People	75
12		75
13	Midterm Exam #2	100
Module 3 - Social Media and Destination Marketing
14	Final Project: Place Promotion with Social Media (website creation, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 Travel Tools; there is no final exam)	75
15		75
16		100
	Total Points (subject to change)	1200

Definitions: Social Media - Social Software - New Media

Social Software Tools that will be used in this class, include:

• Message/Discussion Boards (we will use this in Blackboard-Vista)
• Websites (this will be part of the final project, most student will use the simple online web creator at Weebly.com, or the free domain service from Microsoft Live)
• Wikis (at a minimum, there will be one wiki for each of the Topic Groups above)
• Social Bookmarking (e.g., Del.icio.us - optional)
• Blogs (potentially including video and photo blogging; at a minimum there will be one collaborative group blog for each of the three Topic Groups above)
• Podcasts ( this will be part of Final Project, and if it is good enough I will put it out on my Geography for Travelers podcast - with your permission, of course; this will also be shared with student at the University of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia)
• Virtual Reality (optional; can you promote a destination through Second Life? want to try?)
• Social Networks (all students will be required to join and report on a travel-related social network)

---

NEW: FYI - I presented a summary of this class, along with a small survey of the students, at my university's eLearning Institute in May. Here is the prsentation (audio and slides):

| View | Upload your own

WikiMatrix - Wiki Comparison Tool

WikiMatrix.org is a website that allows you to compare different wiki tools available on the web. It is amazing how many wikis are out there -- currently 77 on the WikiMatrix site. Click on "Choice Wizard" to get started. Comparisons cover an incredible amount of items, including cost/fee options, storage and bandwidth quotas, intended audience, security and spam controls, editing and history features, formatting, media, and statistics. The wikis with the floppy disk icon next to them require server installation, while those with a hand icon are web-based. There is also a Discussion Forum on the topic of wikis.

I have used Wikis to some degree in my classes, and plan to do more. And I have had a few previous entries on this blog related to wikis that I have encountered:

• Collaborative Writing with Writeboard & JotSpot
• Designing Learning Spaces (a Wiki-based class)
• Schtuff.com
• Writely.com

Other interesting links that can be found at the very top of the WikiMatrix page are:

PodcatcherMatrix.org - Did you know that there are 20 different Podcatchers out there! (A podcatcher is a program for subscribing to and downloading podcasts -- iTunes added a podcatcher capability in summer 2005.) The WikiMatrix people also have PodcastMatrix.org -- which looks just like WikiMatrix, but compares podcatchers.

ForumMatrix.org - Compares 20 different Bulletin Board Systems to run your own discussion forums.

Fleck - Annotate Any Webpage

If you click on the title link above, it will take you to the Fleck.com homepage that I just annotated (same as in the photo above). While not intended to be an educational tool, like many other Web 2.0 sites these days, it has a lot of potential.

Fleck allows you to go to any web page, start the Fleck tool (I dragged the link to my favorites toolbar), and then start adding post-it notes on the web page. You can then click on "Share" and get a URL for the annotated page, which you can then send to other people. When the other person goes to the URL, they can move and edit your notes, as well as add their own.

I was just in the process of preparing a class for next semester in which one of the options I will have is for students to create their own web pages about the topics we will be covering. Initially, I will have links to Google Page Creator and to Weebly.com. With Fleck I now have an easy way to comment on and grade their work. And, according to TechCrunch, Fleck is the easiest tool of this kind currently available. Plus, they say:

• There’s a long list of features that Fleck aims to roll out in time, including photo integration, arrows, multi-language support and Pro accounts with premium features. If they can make this a more fleshed out service while retaining the incredible simplicity it offers now, Fleck could grow into a particularly solid contender in the web page annotation space. TechCruncha>, 16 Nov 2006
  

Very Cool!

Others that offer this type of annotation tool are: Stickis.com, Diigo.com, and Trailfire.com. Reviews of the different feature these offer can be found on TechCrunch.

NEW: The Newest site offering a tool like this is Zpeech.com - to create a comment or discussion page about a site, all you need to do is add http://zpeech.com/ before the URL.

Educause Videos + Podcasts Now Available

Educause is a higher education information technology association that sponsors the largest IT event in higher education in the US, and probably the world. This year's annual conference was in Dallas, Texas, earlier this month and drew close to 8000 participants. As of today, you can view videos of 10 of the hundred or more sessions that were held that week - Go Here, then click on the Videos tab. One that I attended and thought was quite good is titled "Pioneering New Territory and Technology".

They also have some interview podcasts (yes, you can subscribe to the feed) on the same site, and will eventually put recordings up of all of the sessions for free (you currently need to pay). Much of the conference is really for university IT and eLearning people, but there is also a lot that is of potential interest to faculty.

NEW: Alternatively, you can subscribe to the Educause Podcast, which includes the interviews from Dallas, on the Educause Connect website on the Podcast tab.

Social Networking for Students and (recent) Alumni

Every now and then I scan Emily Chang's eHub as one of my sources for Web 2.0 teaching and travel tools for my two blogs on those topics (this is the education one; the travel one is here). Recently she posted several social networking website for university students and alumni. Unlike Facebook, which is more of a college-based MySpace, these are focused on collaborative learning, networking for future employment, and campus life.

CLASSROOM NETWORKS

NoteMesh - "Collaborate to Graduate: NoteMesh is a free service that allows college students in the same classes to share notes with each other. It works by creating a wiki for individual classes that users can edit." I think this is a good idea and may even create my own wikis for my classes to discuss and share notes. However, when I mentioned this to my daughter, she suggested that the best students might not want to share their notes with the slackers in a class. In addition, just because there are a lot of students contributing to a set of notes does not mean the notes will be error-free.

Notecentric - "Notecentric is a web based note taking application. Notecentric keeps your notes organized and readily available online." Notecentric allows you to keep your notes online for a class that you are in. You can also elect to be connected with other students in the class (if they are registered with Notecentric), who you can then communicate with and, at your option, share your notes. This is an online version of the more traditional face-2-face ways of sharing notes in a class.

CAREER NETWORKING

Alumwire - "Alumwire is a professional college network that provides personal and career opportunities for alumni, students, and faculty." You either need to have a .edu email address or a Facebook account to register with Alumwire. The site appears to be very new. There is almost no information on the public website. Once you register and log in, there are sections on Job Search, Career Interviews, Career Advice Forums, My Connections (other members), and a Calendar tool. The Advice Forum only has a few postings. If you like basic and simple, you may find this of use, though I am not sure just how many job offers will come from it if the use base is small.

IdeaWhip - "An Entrepreneurial Community For Undergrads, Graduate Students, and Young Alumni...by Them." This is a social networking site for future business people to share ideas and experiences in starting their own business. It also included links to related news stories and online presentations.

CAMPUS LIFE

Campus Central - "For Life Outside the Classroom" at Canadian universities. Sections on this website include Books (for selling textbooks), Classified (for selling anything), Events, Articles (on sports, sex + dating, entertainment, studying, etc.), Profiles (of members), and Message Board (for general discussions). It appears to be very new with not many members or postings, as yet.

CampusReader - "America's College Newspaper" - I think I once saw a print version of this -- a collection of news articles from college and university papers around this US. This one is online and has a lot of articles. You can even customize a section of the homepage to show news items from universities in states near your zip code, which I think could be very valuable. Two other sections on the homepage are "Top Stories" and "Reader Roulette" (random stories from a random state).

Putting Lectures Online - Podcasts, Streaming, and more

I just returned from the 2007 Educause conference in Dallas, which had some 8,000 university IT and eLearning attendees, and almost as many vendors. There I learned of several companies in addition to BoxPopuli (see my previous blog entry) that offer classroom recording/podcasting products similar to BoxPopuli. My impression is that these tools are more robust (more features) than is currently offered by BoxPopuli, but then they may also cost a lot more.

To start, I suggest that you check out this online lecture at Mediasite.com. Yes, it is a sales pitch, but it gives you a good idea of what is possible with these lecture capture and recording tools.

• Emerging Trends in Classroom Webcasting - Presenter:A. Sean Brown VP, Market Development; Date:7/11/2006; Length:1 Hour 4 Minutes 51 Seconds

Mediasite.com (by Sonicfoundry) is both a tool for putting recorded "navigable" lectures online, as well as a directory of lectures that can be viewed from the Mediasite webpage. Like all of the other tools listed here, as well as Box Populi, they offer both a hardware box and software to manage the lecture capture and upload.

Others who offer similar tool are (descriptions of each are copied from their websites):

Tegrity.com -Tegrity Campus is the first student achievement system that impacts learning across the entire institution, improving retention and student satisfaction. Tegrity makes class time available all the time by automatically capturing, storing and indexing every class on campus for replay by every student. With Tegrity, students quickly recall key moments or replay entire classes online, with digital notes, on their iPods and cell phones.

Horizon Wimba Voice Tools - Perfect for language learning and creating vocal exercises in any subject, our web-based voice tools facilitate and promote vocal instruction, collaboration, coaching, and assessment. Increase the interaction and student engagement level of any online class by allowing faculty and students to easily embed vocal interactions into the page level of their CMS (Course Management Systems. Wimba Voice Tools are now perfect for Podcasting and iPods.

Anystream's Apreso - Apreso Podcast software can be affordably, and unobtrusively, installed on existing podium computers in any classroom where lectures are to be captured. This "capture station" automatically interacts with classroom audio sources to record the professor's remarks. It encodes the lecture audio into a podcasting-ready MP3 version of the classroom experience, called an "Apreso," which can then be accessed on-demand from iTunes or other portals, and synchronized to iPods for later replay.

Techsmith.com's Camtasia Studio with Screencast.com's web hosting - Camtasia Studio 4.0 helps you keep pace in a mobile world by making it easy to publish videos and MP3 files for iPod and other portable media players. Now your marketing message, screencast, lecture, or just-in-time training video can reach your audience practically anywhere – on the bus, in a coffee shop, or while they’re jogging. Camtasia Studio videos are simply designed to share....You can publish your videos directly to Screencast.com from Camtasia Studio 4.0. Then, send your viewers to Screencast.com to see your content, or use the site’s built-in RSS and iTunes functionality to automatically deliver the content to them.

Accordent.com's Capture Station - Offered as a fully integrated system, the Accordent Capture Station seamlessly records and synchronizes audio, video and data output from any presentation device (notebook PC, document camera, smart board, etc.) and instantly turns it into an online rich media presentation. Version 2.0 gives administrators the ability to remotely provision resources such as classrooms and encoders as well as automatically stop and start the presentation capture process from a centralized location with Accordent's Event Scheduling & Notification module.

There may have been a few others, but I can't remember them all after three days of higher ed IT overload. I would be happy to add others to this post if anyone lets me know about them.

Box Populi + Meedu = Podcasting for Academia

I came across Box Populi (formerly Webcast in a Box) at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo last week in Ontario, California. The event was a podcast feed-fest! I found almost all of the booths in the exhibition hall of interest, though there was not much that was focuses on education. Among items of potential interest to educators, the guy at Libsyn told me that they are planning to roll out university version of Libsyn Pro (their corporate podcast tool), and Box Populi was showing their almost turnkey podcasting solution.

Box Populi is basically a computer running software that is designed to automate the podcast creation and posting process. It is targeted specifically toward universities that want to podcast lectures. Lecturers would connect a wireless mic for recording themselves and insert a USB thumb drive to identify themselves and their class, and start the recording. When they are done, they remove the UBS drive to stop the recording, which is automatically formatted and uploaded to a server for distribution. The box costs about $1000 and you would need one in each classroom where lectures are being recorded. The Box Populi software (which is open source) can also be configured to run on other computers. The wireless microphone is extra, I believe.

Meedu.org (pronounced Mee-djoo) is a podcast hosting service at UC San Diego that is currently offering to host academic podcasts for free on the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Podcasts can be public or have restricted access.

In talking to the two guys from Box Populi at the Podcast Expo, it sounded like they have a very simple to use, almost turnkey lecture recording and podcast posting device that should enable any school to emulate Stanford on iTunes. I have not yet seen a list of schools who have adopted the Box Populi tool, though there is a quote on the Meedu.org website from Fullerton Community College.

NEW: Marcus at BoxPopuli sent me a partial list of schools (and a few media sources) that have purchased their device. This contains 30 entries, among them: UC's Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, San Jose State University, Oregon State University and the University of Oregon, Princeton, and the Naval Postgraduate School. Non-university buyers include CNN, Powells Bookstore, Intuit, and Atlanta Water and Sewage.

Educause Connect

Educause Connect is a social networking website for people who are interested in all areas of technology in higher education. The site is organized by Tags (they seem to be pre-defined). The tag frequencies as of today were:

• Open Source (256)
• Blog (WebLog) (181)
• EDUCAUSE_ANNUAL (164)
• Teaching and Learning (159)
• E-Learning (95)
• Cybersecurity (94)
• OSS (Open Source Software) (93)
• Podcasting (68)
• Information Systems and Services (63)
• Policy and Law (59)
• Instructional Design (58)
• Social Software/Social Computing (57)
• Raves (55)
• Copyright / Intellectual Property Policies (53)
• CNI - Coalition for Networked Information (51)
• Rants (48)
• Events (47)
• Libraries and Technology (44)
• EDUCAUSE Conferences (41)
• Net Generation Learner (36)
• Intellectual Property Rights (34)
• Learning Space Design (33)
• Social Software (33)
• Blogs (32)
• Microsoft (30)

Each of these leads to a separate page on which numerous resources are brought together. Major sections on these pages include:

1. Featured Content and Primary Publications - from several sources, both text and multimedia
2. Community, including a Wiki, Educause-based Blogs that include the tag word, Jobs, Events, People
3. Elsewhere on the Net, which has the same categories as Community, but lists information from outside of Educause

All of these sections can also be subscribed to via an RSS feed, which I did for my favorite topics.

I stumbled upon this site through and email from the Educause national meeting that is coming up in October in Dallas, Texas. It looks relatively new, with almost none of the wikis having been started by anyone yet. And the site notes that it will be adding more resources in the future. Very worthwhile way of getting information, news and thoughts on your favorite new media applications in higher education. Check it out!

Global Voices Online - Blog Voices from Around the World

Global Voices Online was one of the winners of the 2006 Kights-Batten Award for innovations in journalism. The website received this award for developing “an extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from underreported parts of the world.“

Global Voices Online is a non-profit citizen news and media outlet for bloggers around the world. Its goals are (from its website:

1. To call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.
2. To facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.
3. To advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

This is a great site for classes that deal with contemporary global and regional issues. It allows students and teachers to read perspectives on current events directly from bloggers ( all of which are translated into English, for us Anglophones) living in the countries that are experiencing these events.

In my World Regional Geography class, I often send students to local online newspapers in different countries to write reports. Lately, the website I have used for this has been World-Newspapers.com, which I will continue to use. However, I will now add Global Voices Online as an option as well. It will be interesting to see how (and which) student use this blog site, and how the results compare with more traditional online news outlets.

Learning activities for educational social software

Learning activities for educational social software

This list of activities is designed specifically for the restricted access Me2U system (a version of the open source social software at elgg.org) at Athabasca University. However, the activities can be used on any social software site, including blog sites (MySpace, etc.), discussion forums, and wikis; and especially the Collaborative Learning Tools that bring many of those together in single environments, and which I previously blogged about. Web-based teaching environments, such as Blackboard and WebCT are also suited to these activities.

The activities are all presented in a very brief manner, which is good because they are not overwhelming -- especially since there are so many activities listed. Instead, these are very approachable and allows an instructor to modify any particular approach to meet their class situation. What is striking is how simple many of the activities are, and how familiar they are for anyone who has been involved in student-centered learning, whether online or in the classroom.

Here is an example of one of the activities:

Activity Name: Jigsaws
Number of participants: two or more
Activities:

• The instructor divides an assignment or topic into equal parts. Each participant is responsible for learning or completing their part.
• Each student becomes an expert on their topic and uses their blog on the ME2U web site to teach their section. Other students are encouraged to ask questions and post comments.

Assessment: learners are assessed based on the quality of their presentation of topic and follow-up discussion.
Support technologies: blog, learners can use the “Your Files" area of Me2U to upload files (graphics, text files, etc.) that can be used to enhance instruction.
Suggested time to complete: varies based on course topic


In sum, this website is a useful starting point for anyone interested in using social software in education.

Vitaly's "List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts"

Vitaly Friedman's Notebook: List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts

This blog includes: Tutorials, Free Web tools, Free Software, Commercial Products, and Comments from readers.

Vitaly Friedman is a web site developer in Germany. Other posts on his blog page also have educational value for students:

• 20 Rules Of Smart And Successful Web-development
• 25 Best License-Free Quality Fonts
• 15 Best License-Free Pixel Fonts
• Javascript Libraries Roundup
• Icons Round-Up: Free Mini Pixel Icons
• WebSiteTips.com re-designed
• Creating graphs

Tags: graphs,drawing,tutorials,graphics,charts,fonts,web design,design,icons

EasyBib: Automatic Bibliography Composer

EasyBib: Free Automatic Bibliography Composer - MLA and APA formatting

Most college students take at least one, and often a couple of English classes before they get into my geography classes. So, you would think (or at least I would) that they would know how to create bibliographic references for the more formal papers that require. However, I am amazed how many have no clue on how to write a reference -- and I am actually very liberal in terms of the format I will accept.

Well, here is a tool that I am now linking to in my classes. It leads students through the information they need to know to create a proper reference, and then actually creates it for them in MLA format. (APA format requires upgrading to a paid version of the service.)

My guess is that after they have used this tool a few times they will figure out how to do themselves, which is probably the faster way to do it.

Tags: writing,references,format,bibliography

Quikmaps.com - Maps for the Masses

Quikmaps.com - Maps for the Masses

This site is online mapping made easy. It is limited to points and lines, but looks like a nice tool to get students to think spatially about locations and connections.

Quickmaps.com allows you to "Draw pictures and label things on a google map using simple clicks and drags." This is Fun! It is still in beta, and the "draw Lines" tool did not work for me in Firefox, but the "scribble" line drawing tool did work. This is a neat way to draw the maps that you want - to your house, to the party, and to the beach!

I have not tried these other options yet, but according to the website, once you have drawn your maps you can:

"Blog it! - Post the map on your blog or website. Quikmaps hosts your map, so you don't need to sign up for a 'google maps api key', or anything like that. All you need is a blog.

Send it! - Don't have a blog? Want to email a map? No problem -- just send a link to your quik map.

Change it! - Quikmaps hosts your maps, so you can come back and edit them whenever you want. After you save your changes, your maps will update themselves.

Google Earth it! - See your quikmap in 3D with Google Earth."

NEW: Use A Map.com is another online mapping tool that you might want to check out. They describe themselves as: "A free service that provides you with a map that has a short URL, for example useamap.com/ourplace which is easy to remember and share with others."

{A version of this posting also appears on my Geography for Travelers blog}

Tags: maps,map making,google maps,quickmaps,geography,cartography

Collaborative Learning Tools (updated)

Collaborative Learning Tools (updated)

I discussed the comprehensive office and organizational website, Zoho.com, in my last blog posting. After looking at Zoho.com, and talking about it with a colleague, it seems to me that one of the more valuable skills that university students need to be exposed to is working collaboratively with other people.

Unfortunately, this is also one of the more difficult skills to teach! The most common complaint of "group assignments" is that the share of work is not evenly distributed among group members. Well, what if we structured our classes using "groupware"? Personally, I think this has potential, and I may going to give it a shot in one of my classes this Fall semester -- though I have not yet decided which product to use. If anyone has experience doing this in the classroom, I am open to recommendations.

Zoho Virtual Office

Zoho.com has Zoho Virtual Office, which is a "web-based collaboration groupware"
that includes an Email Client (collaborators can email each other within ZVO), a Virtual Drive for storing shared Documents, a Calendar with Task assigning and setting capabilities, group Chat and IM capability, and shared a Contact list. It is free for up to 10 users, and includes a .exe file that one user must install on a computer that will act as the Zoho server (this can be any desktop PC). The install file works on Windows 2000 and XP and some versions of Linux, but not Mac or older Windows. ZVO costs $295 a year for 25 users.

Basecamp

Probably the best known groupware, however, is that produced by 37Signals.com's Basecamp. Basecamp basically has several tools to facilitate collaborative work: a Discussion Board; a shared To Do list, with due dates, so everyone knows who needs to do what; a File Sharing capability; Time Tracking for each group member; and a Milestones calendar. The Milestone calendar is and alternative To Do list that is structured more like a traditional project management program, with each task shown to span a set number of days in the calendar. The Time Tracking could be useful for tracking student efforts, however, each person enters their own information, so there could be some manipulation of reality here. Also included is Writeboard, an wiki for shared writing. (See my previous comments on Writeboard.)

The Free Version of Basecamp allows one project and does not include File Sharing and the Time Tracker. $12/month gives you 100mb of file sharing and 3 projects. Basecamp does not require any install files and works on both PCs and MACs.

activeCollab

activeCollab is a web-like, open source collaboration and project management tool. It is in alpha (version 0.6) and the website mostly consists of a discussion of desired features, so I am not sure just what is currently available. It is 100% free, but must be installed on your server (using PHP5 and MySQL). As an open source product, activeCollab has a lot of potential, but I would not recommend trying this until it is at least in beta.

!! NEW !! - Teamwork Live

A day after I posted my comments on Zoho Virtual Office and Basecamp, I got an email suggesting that I check out Teamwork Live. This appears to be a simple and straight forward project collaboration tool. It is entirely web-based, with a focus on communication (discussion borad and emailing), file sharing (uploading, searching and online editing/wiki), and assigning and tracking tasks and activities (calendar, a who has done what listing, alerts). The who has done what listing could be useful for grading student work in a project setting.

Teamwork Live lacks some of the bells and whistles of ZVO and Basecamp, but it may also be the easiest to use. And it appears to offer the best deal for struggling teachers -- the free version includes 5mb of file space, is limited to one team, compresses image files, and includes advertisements. $10/month removes the ads and image compression, allows 100mb of file storage, and an unlimited number of teas/projects.

!! NEW !! - ProjectSpaces

ProjectSpaces from Forum One Communications is yet another new project management website, which I just saw listed on eHub! A quick look at the website shows that it has much in common with Teamwork Live - file sharing and online editing, calendar and tasking, and communication with email, discussions, and announcements. There is no free version, and the starting price is $99/month (ouch!) for one project, 500mb file storage, and unlimited members.

=================================================

From 37Signals.com:

Basecamp turns project management and collaboration on its head. Instead of Gantt charts, fancy graphs, and stats-heavy spreadsheets, Basecamp offers message boards, to-do lists, simple scheduling, collaborative writing, and file sharing. Tens of thousands agree it's a better way. Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com said “Basecamp represents the future of software on the Web.” Here's what other people think about Basecamp.

Campfire brings simple group chat to the business setting. Conventional instant messaging is great for quick 1-on-1 chats, but it's miserable for 3 or oror 7 or 15+ people at once. Campfire solves that problem and plenty more. Discover why Campfire is better for group chat than conventional instant messaging and how you can use Campfire in your business. Dick Costolo of Feedburner said, “Once you start using Campfire you won't remember how you got by without it. There's no better tool for business instant messaging.

Backpack is the alternative to those confusing, complex, “organize your life in 25 simple steps” personal information managers. Backpack's simple take on pages, notes, to-dos, and cellphone/email-based reminders is a novel idea in a product category that suffers from status-quo-itis. Backpack is so flexible you'll use it for everything. David Pogue of the New York Times said, “Backpack is a cool organization tool. How very cool," and Thomas Weber of the Wall Street Journal said it's the best product in its class.

Writeboard lets you write, share, revise, and compare text solo or with others. It's the refreshing alternative to bloated word processors that are overkill for 95% of what you write. John Gruber of Daring Fireball said, “Writeboard might be the clearest, simplest web application I've ever seen.” Web-guru Jeffrey Zeldman said, “The brilliant minds at 37signals have done it again.

Ta-da List keeps all your to-do lists together and organized online. Keep the lists to yourself or share them with others for easy collaboration. There's no easier way to get things done. Over 1,000,000 to-do items have been created so far. USA Today awarded Ta-da List with a “Hot Site of the Day” award and people are using it right now to keep track of their favorite movies, grocery lists, people they need to call back, and plenty more.

Tags: zoho,zoho.com,37signals,37signals.com,basecamp,virutal office,project management,collaboration,collaborative learning,education,groupware,teamwork live

Zoho - Comprehensive Suite of Office Tools

Zoho - Affordable software for individuals, small & medium business

Zoho offers the most comprehensive suite of Office and Productivity tools on the web. The word process and spreadsheet are great -- fully functional, fast and easy to use online tools, that can be exported in a wide range for formats, including to each other. For example, a Zoho spreadsheet can be embedded in a Zoho Writer or Show document and be automatically updated when the spreadsheet is changed.

Show is a good start at a presentation program, but only offers a basic editing tool set, with no export cability. There is a real-time sharing ability, so you can share your presentation with others while speaking on a conference call.

The Virtual Office has potential for a class organizational tool, though it will cost some money if you have more than 9 students. Zoho Planner is very basic, and I did not notice any sharing capabilities.

All in all, this has great potential. I am seriously considering using this for my online class on Spreadsheet and Presentations this coming fall.

From the website:

	Online presentation to create, edit, publish, and show presentations. 100% free Try Now		On-demand & On-premise customer relationship management solution. Free upto 3 users. For more, price starts at $12. Try Now
	Online word processor with collaboration features. No download, No install, just sign up to create documents. 100% free Try Now		Create personal and business web applications on your own and manage data collaboratively over the web. 100% free Try Now
	Online alternative to traditional spreadsheet applications with powerful features like charting, collaboration & more. 100% free Try Now		Online organizer to maintain your todo’s, reminders, notes, attachments etc. 100% free Try Now
	Zoho Virtual Office is a web-based collaboration groupware that includes Email Client, Documents, Calendar and more. Free upto 10 users,for more price starts at $295. Try Now		Unique and intuitive way to make group decisions faster. 100% free Try Now
	The easiest way to evaluate candidates online. Free upto 25 candidates. For more, price starts at $199. Try Now		Website Monitoring Service. 100% free Try Now
	Tag based Yellow Pages. 100% free Try Now		Rating. Survey. Polling - Online. 100% free Try Now

Free Web-Based Spreadsheets - Updated

Online Spreadsheets (UPDATED 14 June 2006)

I love spreadsheets! I use them for almost any list that I need to make. There are now three (at least) free online spreadsheet services available. (If there are others, I will add them to this posting as I hear about them.)

EditGrid is one of the first web-based spreadsheets available . By being online it allows collaboration (group work) and access from any computer (for homework assignments). It is currently FREE and any spreadsheet can be locked by its creator, made accessible to the general public or kept private, or only shared with designated registered users (e.g., a group of students). In addition, it maintains a history of changes and who made the changes. While not showing exactly what was changed (as JotSpot does for text documents), this could be used to track contributions from different students.

Very cool. I teach a spreadsheet class in the Fall semester and may give EditGrid a try!

From the website:

Now Open! EditGrid finally announced public beta! The competition is keen here, with a number of strong players, including iRows, NumSum, Numbler, and ZohoSheet. Thanks Omar for the first review! We will make EditGrid the best web spreadsheet.

• See changes in real-time when someone modifies a spreadsheet. We call it RTU (real-time update).
• Full keyboard navigation. Well, almost.
• 135 functions: SUM(), STDEV(), COUNTIF(), VOLOOKUP() etc. Full support is not far away.
• Import from and export to common formats. Including MS Excel, CSV, Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org Calc.
• Access rights for every spreadsheet. Only share yours with those you have invited.
• Cross-browser support. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ and Mozilla FireFox 1.0+ fully supported. Coming soon: Safari.
• A nice "My Worksapce" for you to organise your spreadsheets.

============================

NEW: iRows.com - Another Online Spreadsheet tool with similar features to EditGrid. You can also see their developer blog.

NEW (7 June 2006): Google Spreadsheet - not quite ready for everyone, but the reviews are starting to come out. This is from ZDNet:

• Pros: easy-to-use; free; auto-save; sharing function; lots of functions available ("You won't find many calculations that you can't perform"); imports Excel and CSV files "pretty well"; supports multisheet spreadsheets.
• Cons: no print function; no visualization tools (charts, graphs); no "conditional formatting"; no statistical and analysis tools; no pivot tables; no right-mouse options; no zoom; real-time collaboration and chat feature is cool but potentially confusing.

NEW (14 June 2006): JotSpot also has an online spreadsheet called Tracker

• According to their website you can "Simply copy and paste to publish your spreadsheets as interactive web sites. It only takes 30 seconds." - Data in the spreadsheet is public or private, and can be linked to a calendar or map view. Like most JotSpot products, a limited version is free, while more functionality, spreadsheets or people requires a paid subscription. (Warning: I have found that once you pay it is not that easy to stop the subscription!)

NEW (14 June 2006): wikiCalc Beta Test

If your are a real geek (e.g., you run and manage your own server), then you might want to give wikiCalc a try, though they say it is still quite buggy. According to the wikiCalc website:

• The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and be used with nothing more than a browser on the client.\

Tags: spreadsheet, teaching, google, irows, editgrid, tools, web 2.0, education, jotspot, tracker, wikicalc

Student, Teacher & Administrator Class Tools

Here are three classroom tools that span the needs of Students, Teachers and School Administrators. These are all free to register and use.


FOR STUDENTS: MynoteIT: "The perfect tool for every student. -- mynoteIT is an extremely powerful utility for any student at any grade level. You can store all your school information in one place, and access it anywhere in the world instantly."

This is designed for middle school though university students. The core of the site is a database in which students store class notes which they can save and edit, search and bookmark, print and download, and send to their "buddies". There is a calendar for placing reminders and due dates and a Google Map mashup for locating your buddies. This would be one way to 'compartmentalize' school work from the rest of a student's online life.


FOR TEACHERS: Schoopy - Classroom Organizer, School Homepages, Useful Resources & Fun Games: "I love schoopy ...it helps me keep up with my grades and do my homework. I went from B's to A's' - Lydia - a SCHOOPY student in Maryland"

(Pronounced "skoopy," I think.) This is more for elementary through middle school teachers. The homepage has logins for Teachers and for Parents. For teachers, the site allows you to create a class homepage, a calendar, a list of assignments, document downloads, and a message board. In addition, there is a resource section where a broader group of teachers and parents can share discuss education issues and share lesson plans, and an "educational games" section designed for the kids.


FOR ADMINISTRATORS: The SchoolTool Project: SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license.

This web-based tool is going beta for primary and secondary schools in North America for the 2006-2007 school year. Currently is it mostly just a school-wide calendar system (single school of school district). This summer (2006) they will roll out the tracking of student enrollment, contact and demographic information, attendance management, gradebooks, and reports. Data can be imported and exported from the system. It is all Open Source, so there is considerable potential for a growing number of features in coming years -- if it catches on.

Tags: students,student,teachers,teacher,school administrators,school,class,classroom,homepage,note taking,education,parents

Scanr.com - Scan, copy & fax with a camera phone or digital camera

Scanr.com - Scan, copy and fax with a camera phone or digital camera

After about 10 years since my first online class offering (it was an option in a lecture class), I have finally come to the point where I now teach all of my university classes online (using the WebCT-Vista class shell). If students are late on an assignment, I require some form of written proof of their reason for being late (such as a note from a doctor, or the program from a grandparent's funeral). The most common way that they get this to me is by fax, though I do tell them that it would be OK to take a digital photo and send that.

Well, Scanr.com offers a kind of hybrid photo-fax service that some students might find useful. With this free service, students can take a digital photograph (min. 1.3 megapixels) of a document and email it to Scanr.com. Scanr.com will then process the image to enhance its sharpness and contrast, and email it back to the sender as a .PDF format file that looks a lot like a good quality black and white fax. The student can then forward the email to the instructor.

There is also a "Whiteboard" format, which is intended for copying material on a white board in the same way, but which also provides a color option. Scanr.com also has a Windows Mobile 5.0 application, but I could not get it to work on my Verizon Audioxov XV6700.

Apparently they also "tags documents with extracted keywords", though I did not try that and I am not sure just what use it would be.

Of course there are other potential educational uses of this alternative fax service beyond submitting excuses for late assignments. For me personally, it would still easier to take a photo with a digital camera, process it myself, and just send that. I will grant that Scanr.com could work better for those who think more in terms of traditional "Faxing" or are uncomfortable with photo editing software.

(Actually, if the Windows Mobile 5 application worked, I could imagine myself using that from time to time.)

Tags: scan, scanning, fax, faxing, copy, copying, scanr.com, email, .pdf

Two Free online Database Tools

(1) Lazybase

This looks very intriguing. I am sure that there are many potential edutional uses for it, though right now I am not sure just what (I think my brain may be checking out for the night!)

I used to teach DBMS skills (many years ago!) Looking at the examples on this website, today's online databases sure are a lot more sophisticated in appearance than dBase was. However, they still appear to require a lot of forethought in design and layout.

Lazybase provides some vey creative tools, as well, including mapping, star rankings, and charts. All this could make for some interesting and challenging assignments for students. In particular, it could be used for creating group or class resources. A student could post links and descriptions of items to be added to this, and the whole class could map or rate them. Others can rank and comment (breifly) on each item. Unfortunately, there is no individual password, and any student can change the name that is attributed to each posting -- so there is no way to reliable track individual contributions.


(2) MyOwnDB

This is another online database tool. Its functions appear to be more like a traditional database, with less of the flash of Lazybase. I ould not tell from the demo if it had individually assignable passwords. Might be worth checking out.

Tags: DBMS, Online Databases, Teaching

Windows Live Academic Home Page

I use Google Scholar a lot when looking for references for research articles that I am writing or editing for my journal (Tourism Geographies). Now Microsoft has a competing , and possibly better, research tool. What makes it better is the right side windw that provides full reference material for each item that is found in a search. This is usually the key information that I am looking for, and requires some searching in Google Scholar. The reference information is a great teaching tool, as well, since it shows students the important information that they need to include in their references cited list.

Check it out at: Windows Live Academic

From the webpage:

Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas. Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer.

Tags: Research, References, Referencing, Search, Google Scholar, Academic, Microsoft

YackPack - online voice messaging

YackPack is a free online voice recording tool. The site suggests that it could be used to teach lessons and skills -- verbally describing instructions instead of having students read them (though you probably want both formats, I think). It could be used for podcasting, but since there is no editing this would be a bit limited. It seems to be potentially useful for something like an online discussion forum, but with voice emssages instead of typed messages. It could also be used for annoucements attached to a webpage. And is apparently easy for almost anyone to use.

From the web page:


YackPack allows you to create voice messages online ('yacks') and share those messages with groups ('packs'). Our service runs inside a web browser, so no software installation is needed. Using YackPack is simple: You just 'click, talk, and send.' To get a quick look, watch our Demo Video.
You can launch YackPack from our website, or you can embed our service on your own web page. This takes less than 30 minutes.
"

Designing Learning Spaces (a Wiki-based class)

Designing Learning Spaces

This class is being run in the Spring 2006 quarter at Stanford University. The class homepage is using an open Wiki -- open to the entire world to edit. There is not much there, as of this posting, but should be interesting to see how it develops...

From the class homepage:

"In formal learning settings (schools) and informal settings (any place but school) the design of space shapes personal interactions and affords learning opportunities. This project-based, collaborative course gives students the chance to integrate learning principles into the design of specific spaces for real clients and develop a rubric to assess the impact that spaces have on learning.

About this website

Our course will use a WIKI this quarter to build a knowledge base around learning spaces, to collaborate on our projects, and to post reflections on the intersection of learning and space. Each page of this site can be edited by anyone else in the class - and even the world. The site stores every version of each page, so if you make a mistake or if you feel like a recent update adds no value, you can click history and return the page to its original condition."

Engrade - Free Online Gradebook

Engrade Online Gradebook

Some school and school districts have adopted online tools to do these things, and from what I have heard, these are of mixed useability. Engrade offers a free alternative that looks fairly easy to use.

From the website:

Engrade is a free online gradebook that allows teachers to manage their classes online as well as post grades, assignments, attendance, and upcoming homework online for students and parents to see. Engrade is free and easy to use. Join over 10,000 teachers, parents, and students using Engrade today.

Free Online Gradebook Automatically calculates grades, custom grading scales, weighted assignments
Free Online Attendance Book Easily records attendance, automatically emails parents of absentees
Free Online Homework Calendar Quickly posts upcoming homework for parents and students to see
Free Online Student Reports Real-time access to grades, attendance, and homework

- No Costs Whatsoever Engrade is supported by educational sponsors, it is completely free for all users
- Web-based, Easy to Get Started Set up takes minutes, all you need is a free online account

mynoteIT - Online Student Organizer

mynoteIT: The perfect tool for every student

I am not sure if I would have used something like this as student, but there are probably some out there who would. It reminds me of those calculator-type student organizers -- the kind that Casio and others make, though it also takes advantage of the anywhere, everything and instant messaging capabilities of the Internet.

From the Website:

"Here are some reasons why every student would benifit from mynoteIT. Tell us the scores you get on assignments throughout the semester and we will automatically calculate your grade. Instant access to your teacher's contact information. Our note taking area has an auto-save feature so you never lose any of your notes if your browser crashes. You can also lookup words you don't know, and translate words between languages, instantly inside your workspace. If you need help on a certain subject, use our community search to find what you need, even bookmark notes for later use. Need to find those notes you thought you would never need from two months ago? Use the Your Search option to search through your notes instantly. Build a friends list so you can easily get in contact with your classmates. Our calendar allows you to view all your upcoming assignments so you never forget what is due again. Create (or join) groups at your school so you can more easily share information with the people who need it."

Apple - Education - iTunes U

Apple - Education - iTunes U:

iTunes U
Click. Sync. Learn.
It all starts with learning

Apple shares common goals with education — to advance teaching, learning, and research through innovation, and engage and empower students. Students expect a campus environment that accommodates their digital lifestyle, adapts to their individual learning needs, and encourages collaboration and teamwork. Introducing a way to simplify and meet all these needs — iTunes U."

Collaborative Writing with Writeboard & JotSpot

Writeboard.com and JotSpot (www.Jot.com) are wiki tools that allows students to collaborate on a shared documents that are stored online. Both keep track everytime the document is edited and saved, which (1) ensures that nothing is ever lost, and (2) enables viewing and grading of each student's contribution.

With Writeboard, teachers can simply create a topic and then share the URL and password to the specific site with students. Students can enter and edit text. Both students and teachers can view each change that was made and who it was who made by. The only problem is that there is no control over the name that someone enters when they edit the text -- and they can even leave the name blank. I used this with a small group of six graduate students in the Spring 2006 semester. Unfortunately, paragraphs that students wrote were deleted without a clear explanation (which I had required). The first time the student who did it said he was unaware that he had done that -- which I believe. The second time it happened, the ID was blank. So I have no definitive idea who did it, though there are clues.

JotSpot is a much more robust (and complicated) online editor with tracking features. I just discovered this one. It provides a full MS Word-like editor, and gives each user a different login ID. It also allows setting user access levels (read only, edit, and more) for specific users for specific parts of a document -- which Schtuff.com also does, though Schtuff does not track changes. JotSpot is clearly the best collaborative writing tool for a class environment that I have seen so far. It does, however, take a bit of experimenting to figure out how to best set it up for your situation. The only shortcoming is cost. It is free for 5 users (which will not work with my current 6 students). For up to 10 users it costs $9.95/month.

With only two months left in the semester, I am going to switch to JotSpot. If there are any unanticipated consequences of doing that, I will be posing that information on this blog.

NEW!!! - WebCollaborator.com - I just learned of this one. Sounds a lot like JotSpot, but is completely free for unlimited online use. I have not used it...yet.

EduBlogs, LearnerBlogs, UniBlogs & ESLBlogs

Free blog space for educators and students. These are Ad free, fully featured WordPress blogs (with 25mb of space), and include free Yacapaca assessment (test making) tool from the Chalkface Project. Wordpress generally gives you more flexibility than free blogs available at Blogger.com.

• LearnerBlogs.org - This site has one clear, simple aim: to provide free, high quality blogs for school students.
• UniBlogs.org - This is essentially a place where university and college students can get their own free blog.
• EduBlog.org - Free blogs for teachers, researchers, librarians and other education professionals.
• ESLBlogs.org - Free blogs for ESL and EFL English language learners.

PostGenomic.com

From the website:

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data. For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of which web sites are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often by bioinformaticians, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently by evolutionary biologists. It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community.

This is an interesting, community-driven, way to find the current hottest topics and articles in the Life Sciences -- Totally different from the traditional go-slow approach to academic research publishing!!!

Stickam - Multimedia Blogging Tool

Stickam allows you to post video, photos and audio on most any blog page. It also allows live video chatting. Still in beta at the time of this writing, I think it could be a good (and free up to 500MB) teaching tool, though you would need to send your students to a blog page. Check it out!

Vyew.com - Free online meeting tool

This is a free online collaborative meeting tool. It allows you to share images and captured webpages on your desktop with others who you invite by email to your meeting. You can text message each other and write/draw directly on the images. Voice conference requires use of a telephone -- which is not free. Snapshots of session screens can be saved to disk.

TeachLearning.com Online Curriculum Hot List

This is a huge list of online resources for K-12 teaching. I am sure that there are some innovative Web 2.0 resources here, but since I am not a K-12 teacher, I will have to rely on others to let me know which of these stand out. The links are divided into the following categories:

* The Arts
* Language Arts and Literature
* Mathematics
* Science
* Social Studies
* Media Literacy
* Physical Education
* Special Education
* Girls and Technology
* General Curriculum Resources
* Online Projects
* Software Reviews

The homepage TeachLearning.com has a lot of teacher resources, but requires registration to see most of them. The site also has a lot of very annoying advertisements!!!!

Writely.com

(click on the title above to go to the website)

Writely is yet another collaborative writing tool. It is totally free in its current beta version. It is somewhat similar to Schtuff.com, in that you can designate the email addresses of those who can edit and those who can only view the document; and it does not track changes like Writeboard.com. What is that is different is that it is a full-fledge online word processor, that also allows uploading and downloading files in MS Word format. I have encountered a few bugs in trying to change font and color, possibly due to the beta version.

Schtuff.com

This is another Wiki tool (see my Writeboard entry). Schtuff allows more sophisticated editing than Writeboard, and allows you to designate the email address of those who are permitted to view, edit, and/or comment on the Wiki document. You are allowed three Schtuff spaces at no cost, each of which can have multiple documents. The one thing it does not have, that Writeboard does have, is the ability to track changes made to a document over time.

Create a Custom Magazine from Fickr photos

(click on the title above to go to the website)

This site allows you to grab a Flickr photo and creat a magazine cover using it. I have used this with large, online undergraduate classes. The students love it!!! -- except the 2 to 4% who absolutely cannot follow my detailed instructions for downloading the magazine cover and uploading it into WebCT! For those, I offer an alternative assignment.

BONUS - Click Here for a list of other great Flickr! tools. I am going to check a few others out and will post on this list any that I think are good for teaching.

MapHacks.Net

(click title above to go to website)

OK -- A bit of an esoteric way to start this list, but as a geographer, this is something that I am interested in. According to the site: "We're developing a resource where developers, programmers, and those interested in maphacks can locate news, information, tools, and resources of interest. Topics of focus are Google Maps API, Google Earth, Yahoo! Maps, and MSN Windows Local Live." It is not quite ready yet, but will hopefully be ready soon.

Web 2.0 Teaching Tools - Goals

I think that a lot of the Web 2.0 websites and webtools have great potential in the classroom. And this website is where I am going to post links to these tools. It will start out slow, but should build over time. As a college professor, the tools that I post may be more suited to that level of education. However, I am willing to cosider posting other tools, if you let me know about them.

What is Web 2.0? I suggest these websites to answer that question:

• Web 2.0 : the 24 Minute Documentary (video on TechCruch)
• Web 2.0 Videos and Powerpoints - if you are a visual learner, this is great
• Virtual Karma - Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications -This is what inspired me to start this blog
  
• Wikipedia - "Web 2.0"
• Emily Chang's eHub - eHub is a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing