Archive for April, 2009

Academic Earth: Matt’s Pick of the Week

Academic Earth provides a social wrapper for opencourseware available from universities.

Academic Earth provides a social wrapper for freely available course videos

Where can you find over 1,500 lectures from some of the top universities in the nation? http://www.academicearth.com

Academic Earth does not however produce any content.  Just like wikipedia, youtube, facebook and a host of other services have leveraged user generated content, Academic Earth is hoping to do the same for college lectures.  Academic Earth’s,  ”goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”  (http://academicearth.org/about

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Podcast Episode 03 – Smart or Dumb Boards?

Show Notes:

  1. Encarta is dead – http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3715/microsofts-encarta-rendered-obsolete-by-wikipedia-will-shut-down (3:50)
  2. Google Knowl – http://knol.google.com/ (8:40) Read the rest of this entry »

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Google Apps for Education: Chris’s pick of the week

Google Apps for Education is a free software suite provide by Google.  When used in an educational institution, Google gives the software away completely free to an unlimited number of users. The Google Apps ecosystem includes several applications in a suite including an online email client (based on the companies very popular gmail); an online word processor which has the ability to create, edit, and share documents/spreadsheets/presentations; online calendar; a website creation tool (this can be used to create internal websites or public websites); instant messaging; and a customizable portal.

The great thing about Google Apps for Education is the power and features that you get in a free package.  A school that signs up for a Google Apps account can re-brand the interface to match their logo or mascot and the email system includes more that 7 gigabytes of data for each user (as well as Google’s industry level spam protection). Once you give your users an account through Google Apps, their email address becomes their username and anyone in the organization can share documents, information, and calendars with other people in the organization, or anyone in the world with any Google or Google Apps account. Read the rest of this entry »

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Podcast Episode 02 – The tug and pull of technology

Show Notes:

  1. Asynchronous and Synchronous E-Learning (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE (3:07)
  2. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jing: Matt’s pick of the week

Jing resides on the top of your screen.  Always ready to capture.

Jing resides on the top of your screen. Always ready to capture.

Jing is a software application produced by the same company that has brought us the famous Camtesia and Snagit software suit.  Techsmith, I believe has produced a killer application for quickly producing tutorials and guides based on computer screenshots or screen video captures.  Unlike camtesia and snagit, Jing resides at the top of your screen, ready to be used at a moment’s notice.

Screen captures are as simple as pressing the capture button and then dragging across your screen to select the portion of the screen you want to capture.  From there you can select if you want to capture video with audio naration or still images.  Once you have captured your images or video you can annotate the images with arrows, text etc.

Finally, Jing allows you to easily share your images and videos by e-mailing, instant messaging, pasting into documents, uploading online or to screencast.com.   Screencast.com for free, gives you 2gb of storage as well as 2gb of transfer a month, making it a very easy solution for quick screencast sharing.  Video after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

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Podcast Episode 01

Click the link to listen to our first podcast.

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