Virtual Classrooms with WIMBA and ConnectNow February 27, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: online classroom, virtual classroom, wimba
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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.
