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