About LearnCentral: LearnCentral is a new social learning network for education, sponsored by Elluminate. More than a social network or a learning community, this free, open environment represents the next logical step of combining asynchronous social networking and the ability to store, organize, and find educational resources with the live, online meeting and collaboration provided by Elluminate technology.
Not just for Elluminate customers, LearnCentral is for any educator who is passionate about teaching and learning and wants to find and connect with like-minded colleagues to share content, develop best practices, and collaborate on a global level. While still in its early stages, LearnCentral has the potential to make a significant historical difference in how educators work together for professional development in their own careers.
BigBlueButton is an open source project that is built on over fourteen open source components to create an integrated web conferencing system that runs on mac, unix, or PC computers. In the true sense of open source, we invite you to try out and participate in our project.
Use your iPhone to control your computer. Works like a remote mouse, wireless mouse. This could be useful in the classroom when you don’t want to be tethered to you teacher station during instruction.
SecretBuilders is a safe, fun virtual world where kids live, learn and play among characters and concepts from the Arts, Literature, Science and Humanities. They publish writings and artwork, meet famous characters from great books, learn about Internet Safety, fundraise for their schools.
Created by a former teacher, SecretBuilders provides a wholesome online outlet for kids where they can have fun and learn at the same time. We also created a unique rewards system for teachers to incentivize learning among their students: see the Teachers console for more details
Need an avatar for you Moodle, Facebook, or other online account? Try out these two web based applications to help you create your ideal avatar. (With second tool, you will need to screen capture your final masterpiece and scale it to fit your online service.)
ipadio allows you to broadcast from any phone to the Internet live. Phone blog, collect audio data, record and update the world, or simply let your friends know what you’re doing - ipadio is integrated with Social Media & Blogging platforms.
Videos organized for students created by the developer of Wikipedia. This site uses the API provided by YouTube to create an organized, Wiki-like, useful collection, of videos. This is another great example of the collaborative aspects of the Web!
Wallwisher can be used as an easy brainstorming activity in a 1:1 classroom, or during a lesson in a computer lab where students all have access to computers.
This is a very simple basic math skills practice application. Students are presented 50 questions and have two and a half minutes to complete each challenge.
Kidblog.org is designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with their own , unique blog. Kidblog’s simple , yet powerful tools allow students to publish posts and participate in discussions with in a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over student blogs.
The iPhone and Apps store has been garnishing a lot of attention, and with good reason. Apple is selling 350 Apps every second and has reached a total of three billion sold. Two that recently provide a good example of what is possible with these mobile tools are Dragon Dictation and UstreamBroadcaster. Dragon diction allows you to speak into you phone and it instantly converts you spoken words into text. This application works surprisingly well, and could become a nice alternative to touch typing. (BTW, the Google phone is rumored to have this capability built right into it.) The UstreamBroadcaster tool allows you to do live video broadcasts using Ustream and just your phone. This is an early technology, and there is room for improvement, but it is a glimpse into what is in store for the future. These two iPhone apps provide an example of the what the new handheld technologies can do and should provide the creative teacher with engaging ideas for activities to support student learning.
In anticipation of the Apple announcement later this month and the recent CES presentations related to tablet computers, I found these two video of what the interface on a tablet may be like:
Ten Touch Computer User Interface Video
Mag + Example of Prototype Slate (Tablet) Technology
This is a nifty little tool to organize your query results in Google. Try a few of the examples at the bottom of the screen to get an idea of how it works.
Poll Everywhere has implemented the ability to have people respond via Twitter. This could be a useful tool for getting feedback from a group of people on their mobile phones. Educators can get a free account that will except up to 32 student responses per poll.
