Virtual Classrooms with WIMBA and ConnectNow February 27, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: online classroom, virtual classroom, wimba
add a comment
Online virtual classrooms allow teachers to extend their learning environment across time and space barriers, making resources, including the teacher, available to students from their homes or other places. Although there are quite a few options for doing this, I wanted to highlight a couple of promising tools.
Wimba is an online classroom that is currently available to all teachers in Utah through UEN. Students can log in to your virtual classroom through your my.uen page. There they can interact with the teacher and other participants through audio, video, and chat. There is a content area where the teacher can share images or videos or use an interative whiteboard. Contact the Technology Curriculum Specialists if you would like a tour of Wimba and how you might use it to extend your own learning environment.
ConnectNow is similar to Wimba, except that it focuses more on the audio and video chatting. It is like a web-conferencing tool that is free through Adobe. It seemed to work very well, and is not limited to teachers or districts.
Another new option just hit the blogs this week. Moodle Rooms has teamed with Google to put together a great educational version of online classes. I will look into it more as it develops and keep people informed.
SimplyBox – Collaborative Research February 17, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: collaboration, simplybox
add a comment
SimplyBox is a free tool that allows you to take a screenshot of text or images on the web and save them into “boxes” or collections of related screenshots. These boxes can be organized and displayed with different views, and I can also share boxes or individual screenshots with colleagues.
As a teacher, I might add a box for a new project and then surf the web for a few resources that relate to that topic. Then I could share that box with students, having them look at the resources in the box (like giving them the URLS and directions on specifically which parts of that website to look at). All of the resources are right there, available at home or at school. Students can comment on the clipping, and they can visit the site from there if they need to.
I use SimplyBox with my Firefox browser, and there is a handy add-on toolbar to make it very easy to grab something from the screen and throw it in the appropriate box to be organized later.
Give it at try at Simplybox.com, then respond with creative ways that you are finding to use this tool.
