Tag Archive for 'tools'

Scriblink: A Free Digital Whiteboard

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 [...]

Big Think: YouTube for Ideas

Big Think. ‘bigthink.com is a new and growing website, currently in its private beta version, with a simple mission:
This is a digital age, one in which a wealth of accessible information empowers you, the citizen-consumer. But where is the information coming from? How accurate and unprocessed is it, really? Ask yourself this: how empowered do [...]

Innovate: Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way

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 [...]

TechLearning 2007 Leaders of the Year and Awards of Excellence

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 [...]

Chat as an Instructional Tool

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 [...]

OLAT (Online Learning And Training): Open Source LMS

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 [...]

JISC’s In Their Own Words: Understanding the Learner’s Perspective on e-Learning

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 [...]

Alice: A 3D Programming Environment from Carnegie Mellon University

‘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 [...]

Sketchcast: a potential educational tool ready to be discovered

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 [...]

Presentation: PowerPoint Clone Included on Google Docs

C|Net News: Google Presentations gets the green light. ‘Google announced the launch on Monday night of its long-awaited, Web-based competitor to PowerPoint. Google Presentations, which is free, is part of the company’s online office suite, Google Docs.
Right off the bat, you will notice that Presentations has some of the same basic functionality as Microsoft’s PowerPoint. [...]

Academic Scrapbooking as a Powerful Classroom Tool

Edutopia: Academic Scrapbooking: Snapshots of Learning. ‘A social studies teacher uses photo journals to make learning more personal and immediate for her students. Here’s an assignment: Grab a stack of acid-free paper, some glue sticks, and a few photographs, and set your students to work on a scrapbook.
Sounds a little like arts-and-crafts time? Perhaps, but [...]

eBook: Taking One-to-One Computing to the Next Level

Taking One-to-One Computing to the Next Level - Laptop Learning Lightens Up Simple Storage Solutions. ‘One-to-one computing holds out the exciting promise of engaging students and empowering educators. Convertible notebook PCs, in particular, can be powerful tools to stimulate inspiration and interaction. This eBook contains suggestions on incorporating some of these new technologies into a [...]