Weebly, a browser-based website creation tool, was rated one of Time Magazines top websites of 2007, offering users an easy way to build a website using a set of predefined drag and drop page elements. Weebly has now released...
The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) released its annual study of undergraduate students and information technology report earlier this month. The report is available in a number of forms and formats at this URL: http://www.educause.edu/Resources/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/187232 The full title of...
Wiggio focuses on group collaboration, providing email, chat, conference calling, and meeting space in one place. The Wiggio toolset is extended by integrating text messaging and social networking tools such as Facebook. Wiggio is targeting academic and student groups as...
"Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment, when the benefit to society is larger than the damage to the copyright holder. It is an essential part of copyright policy in the United States, where...
We've written about several annotation tools in the past, but the number of tools and the functionality that they offer seems to have exploded recently. What follows is a review of some tools and resources where you can learn more....
Wufoo is an web service that helps you build online forms easily. It automatically builds the database and other code necessary for interactive functionality and storage of data. After you set up an account, you are sent a confirmation...
Aviary, already known for their online image tools, has released a simple and powerful web-based audio editor named Myna. The audio editor includes a professional loop library, that can add polish to your recordings. Finished audio files can be exported...
There are a number of ways to "live broadcast" your desktop to audiences small and large. They include tools like VNC, Adobe Connect, Skype, iChat... the list goes on. One stands above the others for ease-of-use, cost, and compatibility: Zoho...
Dimdim.com offers free web video conferences for up to 20 participants. The service is fairly simple to use, but highly customizable. Invitees need a browser with Flash support, but do not need a Dimdim account to participate. In under ten...
The California State University, via Delta Initiative, an independent consultant, released a report on the state the learning management systems (LMS) market. The report is available as slides and an hour-long WebEx presentation archive that helps give context to the...
Scribd is an online platform that lets you publish, share and discover documents on the Web. Scribd works like YouTube, but you browse and upload texts instead of videos. Started in 2007, usage has grown dramatically and now it is...
There are a dizzying array of technologies for faculty to use in their teaching. We at CCNMTL want to ensure that faculty can get answers where they need them when they need them, 24 hours a day. So, starting this...
Alexander Street Press' Critical Video Editions combine extensive collections of video with a powerful suite of searching, video clipping and sharing tools specially designed for teachers and researchers. The collections include famous and rare video from the performing arts as...
Prezi, the zooming presentation editor from the media lab Kitchen Budapest, may change the way that you think about creating presentations. Prezi uses a zoomable user interface concept to turn flat slideshows into visually stunning canvases that you navigate...
The New Media Consortium Summer Conference 2009 was held last month, and the NMC has released a number of videos from the event, including the two engaging keynote presentations from Kathy Sierra and Marco Torres. Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Learners...
There is a lot of buzz right now around the native <video> tag specified in HTML 5. The introduction of the <video> tag is a pretty big deal. Up until now, to display video in a browser, you needed to...
SlideShare is a free web service that allows users to upload, tag, embed, comment on, and share PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote, and PDF presentations. While other companies like Scribd and Google Docs offer some of the same features, with SlideShare...
The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT), based in the UK, has compiled its third annual top 100 tools for learning by "inviting learning professionals from all over the world to share their top 10 tools for learning." The...
Twitter, the free social networking and micro-blogging tool that is built on instant messaging technology, continues to be one of the largest and fastest growing member-driven sites on the World Wide Web. Launched in 2006, Twitter appeals to a wide...
According to aviary.com, "Aviary is a powerful suite of browser-based design tools for people who create." The company has released four web applications: Phoenix, a layer-based image editor; Peacock, a filter editor for effects and visualizations; Toucan, a color manager;...
VideoANT is a simple, easy-to-use online environment developed at the University of Minnesota that synchronizes video with timeline-based text annotations. VideoANT is designed to engage learners by supporting interactions between students, instructors, and their videos. VideoANT can handle YouTube...
The Commons on Flickr is a project that makes some of the world's greatest public photography archives available at no cost. Thousands of photos are available for download and can be used by faculty and students for teaching, research, presentations,...
Two illustrative talks on how digital media and participatory culture are changing students are presented here. These two videos from well-known thinkers in the field are amazingly rich and overlap in interesting ways. While the videos are long, the 120...
"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work--in the web browser itself." The Zotero 1.5 Beta Firefox extension offers a number...
If you like saving useful articles, papers, and pages from the web for to read later but want more than just the tagging features of bookmarking sites like Delicious or CiteULike, there are several easy-to-use products tailored to provide this...
The award-winning Papers for Mac (OS X only) is an application that makes it easy to organize science papers and journal articles, integrating smoothly with sources like Google Scholar, JSTOR, Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed to automatically pull metadata...
The demand for lecture capture continues to grow on campuses and some studies show that the benefits are clear. Here are three different perspectives on the topic: A 2008 survey of almost 7,500 University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate found that an...
Freebase is an open database of the world's information. Similar to Wikipedia in goals, Freebase differs by how information is organized. Freebase focuses on facts and statistics rather than articles. Freebase data is meant to be reusable for other purposes...
The New York Times is prototyping a feature they call article skimmer. The goal is "to provide [the spread-the-_New-York-Times_-on-the-tabletop] experience anytime.... We display as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen." The article skimmer...
Price aside (nearly $300 for Photoshop for the academic license) Photoshop is sometimes overkill for most of basic photo editing needs. Enter online photo editing sites. There are a lot of them, but CNET has assembled a concise, tabular...
New mapping technologies are increasingly being used by teachers to creatively engage students in field work projects. Prof. Kenneth Jackson's New York Neighborhoods Wiki used Google and other mapping software to help students create unique research about local New...
Incorporating learning management systems into the classroom is no new idea in higher education. Many of these management systems, such as Blackboard and Moodle, do a good job distributing information and providing a place for users to record and store...
Vimeo is a video-centric social network site, supporting many features such as embedding, sharing, video storage, and user comments. Unlike YouTube and other video sharing sites, Vimeo allows only user-created videos, and caters to high-end video content creators, offering higher...
YouTube is now offering some content creators the option to add a Creative Commons license to their video uploads. In a related move, YouTube has added an option to allow downloading of certain videos. Downloadable videos are free or include...
WilsonWeb, a comprehensive search tool to which Columbia subscribes, recently added a "listen" button next to its full-text HTML articles. The automatic reader sounds surprisingly natural. Because the audio can be downloaded, this is a great resource for on-the-go researchers...
Educators can become broadcasters with Ustream.tv. Ustream allows anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and a webcam to quickly set up their own channel and broadcast live. The broadcast can be password protected for situations where you want to...
The Columbia University Libraries have released a customized version of the popular LibX plugin for Firefox browsers. The LibX plugin can be customized to perform searches on the local library catalog. Once installed, LibX enables direct Columbia catalog (CLIO) searches...
The annual Horizon Report seeks to identify emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on research and teaching and learning. The report is produced as a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE. The 2009 report identifies six...
Pedagogy in Action is a portal site from the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College that seeks to improve education through projects that support educators. On the site are numerous pages covering teaching methods, activities, and research on...
Provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act serve as a deterrent to teachers and instructors in the use of copyrighted materials under fair use at a time when media literacy competencies are most needed. The Library of Congress Copyright Office...
There are several web-based "audience response system" packages available. Poll Everywhere offers some pretty nice features including various input methods (SMS, Smartphone or desktop/web-based voting), polling/output views (e.g. hidden polling results during voting and customized output graphs) and Powerpoint integration....
The flexibility of YouTube videos continues to improve with additions helpful for many educators. Here are a few highlights to add to earlier postings about YouTube features. Widescreen Video YouTube changed the aspect ratio of its video player from 4:3...
Xtimeline.com is a service for creating timelines through an easy-to-use interface. Timelines can be collaboratively edited and data can be imported via a CSV file or and RSS feed. See an example: The History of Video Games...
Instructors looking to add a class mapping assignments that include a 'field work' component should take a look at EveryTrail. EveryTrail is a free service that allows you to record, visualize and share any trip using geotagged photos. New to...
YouTube has released a new caption feature for videos. As summarized in a recent YouTube Blog posting: "[W]e've added a new captioning feature which allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding of your video. Captions can help people who...
Mashable.com has a posting covering digital notebooks for scholarly and research use. While not a full review, the article does offer a list of contenders for anyone looking around for a solution. The list includes iLeonardo, Google Notebook, and Zoho...
Anyone interesting in delving deeper into the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign will find a new site released by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond of some interest. Voting America is a mapping site that allows users to...
While this Educause article relates mostly on to the conversion from audiotape lecture-capture system to a digital one, there are interesting lessons to be learned from a school that has been recording lectures for a long time as they might...
The American Library Association recently released a digital slider tool allowing you to check various copyright terms for works released in the United States. The tool can be viewed at the following location: http://librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/...
Sometimes it is imperative to run Internet Explorer (IE) because a website depends on IE features. For example, some CourseWorks elements only work on IE. For Mac users, this is a problem because IE no longer exists for OS X....
The Educause Center for Applied Research released a research bulletin, Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management Systems by Niall Sclater, Open University (subscription required). The bulletin offers a critical look at the role of LMS...
YouTube recently announced the addition of a video annotation tool. YouTube describes that users can add three types of annotations to their own videos: speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. Links, which presently only point to other parts of YouTube, can...
"Dipity is the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about." Dipity's newest product is TimeTube, combining YouTube and Dipity timelines....
More than another web-based video tool with a stupid name, Omnisio enables users to: select clips from YouTube and other video service embed comments in the video assemble your own video compilations from edits you've made sync a video to...
There are dozens of concept mapping tools available on the Web. Many are free and quite good. One that stands out is mindmeister. It is exportable in several formats, embeddable, and has many wiki-like features. For example, see a concept...
An experiment from Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University : The World Simulation, thanks in part to the use of Twitter and Jott, allowed students to send live updates of major events through their mobile phones. The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgbfMY-6giY The...
Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in Claremont, CA, ran a course on YouTube, called Learning from YouTube, in Fall 2007. The goal was to better understand this new media-cultural phenomenon, and how it can be used...
The Harvard University Department of Romance Languages and Literatures compiled a survey of what technologies students find most helpful. Their abstract: "Project Mission: As digital technologies become a more important part of students' lives both inside and outside the classroom,...
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know series provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and...
Access to restricted Columbia University Libraries resources such as databases, ejournals, and other commercial services is limited to Columbia network users. To provide remote access to Columbia affiliates, the Libraries operate a proxy server. When you connect to restricted resources...
A helpful introductory piece from the folks at WordPress.org on blogging. It describes the terminology, such as trackbacks, pingbacks, syndication and more. They describe a blog as "a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on...
The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition makes available the Cmap Tools program for constructing, navigating, sharing and criticizing knowledge models represented as concept maps. The free desktop application is available for Windows, Macs, and Linux computers....
