While with any new technology there is a period of nervousness for teachers (more than students) in terms of training, course preparation, and implementation, if the nervous state of use quickly becomes habit, then the use of technology can become rote and meaningless for the student. Just as we all became so obsessed with […]
Wimba Collaboration Suite Enhances Moodle Integration
Wimba recently announced that it’s expanded its support for Moodle, the popular open source learning management system. The enhanced support is designed to make it easier to integrate the Wimba Collaboration Suite in Moodle environments and broaden the features available, including a new new voice-mail feature that instructors and students can use to talk (literally) […]
Texas A&M Video Campaign Shows New Face of Marketing
In a move that will certainly be echoed by other institutions if it hasn’t been already, Texas A&M University just launched a new microsite specifically to let students post YouTube-style videos showing what life as an Aggie is all about. The site, along with a new Facebook profile, is part of a university marketing campaign […]
My Space profiles send teacher to unemployment line, court
Every teacher wants to be the cool guy, the Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poet’s-Society friend to students, but a court case from Connecticut offers a lesson to teachers-in-training: be careful when you buddy up to students online. While sites like MySpace make it easy to engage in casual contact with students, they also make it easy for the contact […]
Mississippi Community Colleges Deploy Collaborative Tools
The Mississippi State Board for Community and Junior Colleges (MSBCJC) has selected the Wimba Collaboration Suite to deploy throughout Mississippi, allowing students and educators to connect through online video, voice, text, application sharing, polling, and white boarding.
The MSBCJC serves 273,000 students across 15 campuses statewide. Students can access courses from any of the system’s 15 […]
Majoring in video games
“Are you serious?” they asked.
He was. The 21-year-old USC graduate student proved it by switching the focus of his computer science doctorate from a field known as distributed systems to video game programming.
He then launched a campaign to convince his parents back home in New Delhi that helping people have fun was not only a […]
Using Chat To Move the Thinking Process Forward
The idea of using chat as a communication tool with students is widely accepted in education. Using the same tool to progress critical thinking is not often discussed. That is, the question might be asked, “Why use an online tool when I can discuss with my students face to face?”
The reality is often that, […]
Expectations and technology don’t align in smart classrooms
The governmental sales branch of the giant technology vendor CDW apparently got interested in how its wares were being deployed in the classrooms of US college campuses. To find out, it commissioned an online survey that pulled in roughly similar numbers of students, faculty, and IT staff, and quizzed them about the use of technology […]
Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend: Algebra
The eighth-grade math class at Intermediate School 30 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sounded like a video arcade on Monday morning as 30 students zoomed through virtual tunnels and zapped competitors with a blue freezing light.
Then all action stopped as an algebra problem popped on screen: What is the slope-intercept formula for points A and […]
College Students Find WiFi Essential to Education, Survey Reports
Ninety percent of college students in the United States say WiFi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers, and nearly three in five say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free WiFi, according to a survey by the WiFi Alliance and Wakefield Research. What’s more, 79 percent said that […]