Archive for the 'Tools' Category
May 12th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
Scriblink - Your Online Whiteboard. ‘Scriblink is a free digital whiteboard that users can share online in real-time. Sorta like pen and paper, minus the dead trees, plastic, and the inconvenience of being at the same place at the same time.
We are all about collaboration. Whether you’re here for pure artistic enjoyment or more practical matters such as layout planning, concept diagramming, or tutoring a friend in math, Scriblink brings you the power of free hand expression with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world.
On the homepage you’ll be immediately directed to a Scriblink board, which is free and requires no registration. The board allows you to invite up to five people at a time to join you, either through email or directly by copying and pasting the URL.’
Scriblink: The Official Blog
May 5th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
The Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is a tool that enables you to create high quality, interactive, online courses. Virtually anyone can publish e-learning courses by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactivities, quizzes, games, and assessments—as well as Silverlight-based animations, demos, and other multimedia.
Note that a free registration is needed to download the LCDS.
February 15th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
ICT Results: Attention please! Next-generation e-learning is here. ‘Take an e-learning platform, mix in a large dose of social networking, sprinkle liberally with intelligent software agents to stimulate users and, according to a team of European researchers, you have a recipe to keep students’ attention even during the most testing training courses.
Recent trials of two new software platforms based on this new approach show substantial promise in overcoming one of the biggest problems that has dogged e-learning: how to keep students motivated and attentive. The platforms, developed in the AtGentive project, are designed to aid students in the classroom and to help them continue learning and collaborating long after classroom sessions have ended.
“The first generation of e-learning platforms focused on replicating online the classroom model of teaching, but this approach has not been all that successful,” explains Thierry Nabeth, the coordinator of AtGentive at INSEAD’s Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies in France. “The biggest problem is that students often lack motivation both inside and outside of the classroom, and fail to dedicate their attention to the learning programme.”
In an effort to overcome that problem, the AtGentive researchers incorporated artificial agents and social networking into their approach toward e-learning, employing, in the case of one of the platforms, similar techniques to those that have made websites, such as Facebook, so popular as a means of staying in touch with friends, relatives and colleagues.’
AtGentive: Attentive Agents for Collaborative Learners. ‘ The objective of the AtGentive project is to investigate the use of artificial agents for supporting the management of the attention of young or adult learners in the context of individual and collaborative learning environments.
Practically, this project consists in the design of artificial agents that are able to coach the learners in reaching higher level of performance in managing their attention in the learning process. These agents, which appear as embedded characters, are able to profile the state of the attention of the learners (short or long term) by observing their actions, to assess, to analyse and to reason on these states of attention, and to provide some proactive coaching (assessment, guidance, stimulation, etc.).’
ICT Results. ‘ICT Results is an editorial service created for the European Commission to showcase EU-funded ICT research and activities.’
January 17th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
Multiply. ‘Multiply gives you an easy way to share all kinds of digital media, including photos, blogs, videos, music and more, all in one convenient place: your own personal web site. With Multiply, you can share and discuss your stuff with everyone in your “social network,” and also be alerted whenever they have something new.’
January 7th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
Wikia Search Alpha Launched. ‘Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine.
Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.
Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the “mini articles” that appear at the top of popular search terms.’
January 4th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way, Shelley Henson Johnson, Brett Shelton, and David Wiley, Innovate, Vol. 4, December 2007/January 2008. Synopsis: Recognizing the pedagogical value of gaming, academics along with game designers and educational content developers have begun producing resources to improve educational game design and make instructional games more accessible to teachers wanting to incorporate them into their classes. However, the rapid growth of such resources has made it difficult for educators and other interested parties to find what they need. As a first step towards addressing this problem, Shelley Henson Johnson, Brett Shelton, and David Wiley discuss the creation and proposed expansion of the Teaching Educational Games Resources wiki. They first created the wiki as part of a session at the Games, Learning and Society 2006 conference. Panelists and participants contributed to the wiki before, during, and after the conference session, creating an online space that incorporates syllabi and readings for educational game design, lists hundreds of online resources, and includes links to conferences and multimedia resources. After outlining the creation of the wiki, the authors suggest that its incorporation into an online self-organizing social system could facilitate its growth and the emergence of an online community of game designers, researchers, and educators interested in educational gaming.
Teaching Educational Games Resources Wiki. Current topics: Readings, Multi-media Materials, Technical Resources, Classroom Help, Additional Teaching Resources, Career Resources and Gaming and Libraries. Very good!
January 4th, 2008 by Jorge Goncalves
Leaders of theYear 2007: For the 20th year, T&L is proud to honor outstanding educators. In the following pages we bring you profiles of innovation, of courage, of determination, and most important, of dedication to the future of students. You will read about: a superintendent who turned around a “failing community” through the use of technology; an e-learning specialist who restructured an entire state’s approach professional development; a technology director who, against great odds, developed a digital academy for at-risk students; and a graphic arts teacher who single-handedly trained small-town students to compete and win on a global with 21st-century technologies.’
Awards of Excellence: ‘At this quarter-century mark in our Awards of Excellence program, we are happy to recognize 54 high-quality offerings for the 21st-century education market. From 120 entries, our 32 educator-judges and editorial team had the tough job of whittling down this broad selection of practical and innovative tools and resources.’
November 9th, 2007 by Jorge Goncalves
Campus Technology: Tips for Using Chat as an Instructional Tool by Ruth Reynard. ‘Chat software (text or media-based) provides an excellent tool in supporting academic dialog (exchange), critical thinking, and knowledge building. The immediacy of the technology provides students with a direct connection with the instructor as well as other students. While chat software is usually used for “chatting,” and, therefore, it has a relaxed and colloquial protocol, with a little thought and planning, it can also be used well to support instruction.
Many classroom instructors and online instructors use chat software to provide virtual office hours and for easy question and answer sessions. More, however, can be achieved in the instructional process using the tool to create real-time collaboration and discussion that leads to in-depth academic processing of course material.’
October 15th, 2007 by Jorge Goncalves
OLAT (Online Learning And Training) is a web-based open-source Learning Management System (LMS) based on Java and completely free of charge.
The development of OLAT started in 1999 at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where it is the strategic learning management system and deployed on the main OLAT server. The University of Zurich leads the further development and has a team of 12 developers pushing OLAT to the next level.
See the OLAT feature list or the documentation section to get more information about OLAT.’
OLAT main features:
It is open-source and therefore free of charge
The Java based framework can handle over 700 students simultaneously on one standard Linux server
OLAT uses cutting edge AJAX/Web 2.0 technology
It is multilingual (UTF8) and offers translations for over 15 languages
OLAT supports eLearning standards such as SCORM, IMS Content Packaging or QTI
October 15th, 2007 by Jorge Goncalves
New JISC publication explores the learner’s perspective on e-learning. ‘A new publication from the JISC e-Learning Programme, In Their Own Words, has been launched at ALT-C in Nottingham. Synthesising outputs from Phase 1 of the Learners’ Experiences of e-Learning theme, it gives striking insights into learners’ motivations, beliefs and intentions about using technology in learning.
Designed as a flexible package to assist others in understanding the learner’s perspective on e-learning, In Their Own Words also provides a range of resources for internal institutional use. These include two pull-out information sheets on the social software and personal tools and technologies used by the learners participating in the studies, and a CD-ROM containing the original reports from the studies, five video case studies and a series of short guides summarising key messages for different sectors and roles.
In Their Own Words will primarily be of interest to managers, academic practitioners and technical staff in further and higher education, but is also of relevance to researchers and systems and tools developers.’
Learner Experiences of e-Learning: Phase 1 and Phase 2.
October 7th, 2007 by Jorge Goncalves
‘Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.’
October 2nd, 2007 by Jorge Goncalves
Sketchcast. ‘Sketchcasting is a new way to communicate something online by recording a sketch, optionally with your voice speaking. Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel here (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed).
Sketchcast is new but it’s based on an old principle: the whiteboard (or the napkin in a bar) on which you sketch something to get a concept across… or to just have some fun. Sketchasting was invented by Richard Ziade on July 23rd, 2007.
Richard Ziade blog: basement.org
