Seesmic is like instant messaging with video. Or twitter with video. Basically, you have asynchronous conversations with other people by leaving your video postings on the Seesmic site. It’s a form of micro-blogging.
I reckon this could be quite fun to use with students.
IMMEX is a suite of software applications that challenge a student’s problem solving skills and provide teachers with real time assessment tools. IMMEX stands for Interactive Multi-Media EXercises.
Here’s what IMMEX states about its goals:
Our goal is to develop and promote learning models, based on our vast collection of performance data. The use of IMMEX software has been scientifically shown to have significant positive effects on students’ understanding of science content as well as the process of scientific investigation. By integrating our multimedia simulations into a unique web-based learning platform for modeling strategic thinking and problem solving, we are able to help teachers in over 4,000 classes internationally.
Kaltura is an online tool that allows groups of people to make videos together in their web browsers.
You can post your Kaltura interactive video player (looks like a YouTube video – except it’s editable) on your blog, from where you can invite other people to add more video, sound or pictures. You record directly into the video player on your web page and new content is added to the end of the video. Very clever.
Watch the Kaltura video tutorials
It looks awesome.
PBWiki has just announced improvements to their user interface. They’re inviting people to test the beta. http://pbwiki.com/content/pbwiki-beta
The thing that caught my attention was this bit about improving PBwiki’s wysiwyg editor:
“When we launched our Point-and-Click editor a year ago, we noticed a quick upsurge in our usage. The easier it is to edit, the more people use PBwiki.” link
So if your wiki’s text editor is easy to use, more people will use your wiki. Common sense, but good to see it stated.
I’m a bit disappointed. Jotspot was great. Google’s replacement for it, Google Sites, is not so hot. Here’s why I think so.
Jotspot was more than a wiki. It was a platform on which developers could build applications. For example, the Jotspot site we use has a blog, an app called a ‘bug reporter’, a discussion forum, a ‘knowledge base’ app and a project management tool. There were many other apps you could choose to add. I was hoping that Google Sites would continue to deliver this great functionality. Sadly, it does not. Read More…
Yolango is like YouTube, but has captions added to the videos to help people who are learning English. It’s also free. Here’s the blurb:
Yolango.com is a new way for English language learners from around the world to immerse themselves in a wide variety of authentic and interesting videos. What makes Yolango different from other sites, however, is that all of our videos have been carefully transcribed and captioned. What’s more, Yolango captions are clickable, enabling users to receive definitions, usage examples and world level translations in 13 different languages for words they don’t know or would like to study further. Every video at Yolango also offers several challenging interactive games that build users’ listening, vocabulary, spelling and comprehension skills. Users compete to earn points and rise to the top of the Scoreboard.
Yolango offers translations of words from the video transcripts into 13 languages.
Creative Commons now has a site devoted to learning licences.
“Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.”
click for — ccLearn
Webware has just revealed the results of their Webware 100 public poll on the best Web2.0 sites/online applications.
There were more than 5,000 nominations for sites to be included in this awards program, which Webware’s editors pruned to a list of 250 finalists. Users then voted on those finalists – there were 489,467 votes cast. click for Webware 100 voting results
The top 10 vote winners, which accounted for 45 percent of all votes, were, in alphabetical order (links open in Webware page with links to the winning sites):
Explanation of the above list
I’m going to check out Bebo & Gaia ‘cos I know very little about them.
As for the others, no big surprises. Firefox is, without doubt, the best browser. Anything Google is good. Wikipedia, well naturally. YouTube and MySpace too. Stardoll I mentioned in an earlier post. And Wordpress, well, this blog is a Wordpress blog. Nuf sed.
