Thursday, August 24, 2006

English Daily.com

Free Resources for Learning English Online. Useful as a reference site too. Free exercises, idioms, common abbreviations, slang, proverbs and much more.

Friday, August 18, 2006

What is mLearning?

Start with m-Learning.org: " m-learning is mobile learning: using mobile technologies (such as mobile phones and hand-held computers) to enhance the learning process. With a background of more than 4 years of trialling, research and development, m-learning has helped thousands of learners from all walks of life to develop their skills, confidence and motivation to learn."

mLearning Tools

Stephen Downe's article, posted in the blog Half An Hour. "...when we are thinking about mobile applications, probably the primary challenge will be to enable people not only to receive relevant content in this multimedia language, but to compose, on the fly, with no more real difficulty than (say) speaking, multimedia messages, that can be beamed to colleagues or broadcast to the world."

Thinking Worlds

"Serious Educational Game Online" ~ "...an incredibly versatile and globally unique educational games authoring engine. This game allows you to play, edit, create and even share games with other members of the Thinking Worlds™ community. Thinking Worlds is based on well researched and proven learning principles and has already been used to develop highly engaging games in many subject areas. This is your chance to take part in a GLOBAL six month BETA trial of this new exciting learning-based game for FREE."

Here's an article about Thinking Worlds from the blog: Educational Technology & Life.

Wikis in Education

from wwwTools for Education, a full page all about Wikis. Headings include Terminology, Overviews & Background Reading, Role of Wikis, Pedagogy, Implementations, and many links to existing wikis for you to explore - teachers, students, courses, etc.

Mobile Musings

The new blog from the K-12 Handhelds site. "This blog will feature a variety of thoughts, news, best practices, and other items of interest related to mobile technologies and one-to-one computing."

Weblogs in the Classroom

From Australia's Dept. of Education & Training. Articles include: Educational Value of Weblogs; Classroom and Teacher Applications; Getting Started. Links to free blogging software.

Gong - The Web Voice Communication Tool

"A FREE system for voice communication on the Web. It allows groups of people such as students and teachers to participate in discussion groups using their computers, using both synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous chat. It is commonly used by schools and universities for providing a 'voice board' for teaching purposes. There are several different ways you can use Gong. All are free and unlimited."

Moodle eLearning Course Development

The SchoolForge site has a link to the 73 page book here [5 mb]. Read about the book here.
"A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery and using the best educational practices. Moodle is relatively easy to install and use, but the real challenge is to develop a learning process that leverages its power and maps effectively onto the content established learning situation. This book guides you through meeting that challenge."

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Skype Users: Try Unyte as a Teach/Learn Tool

A colleague has tried this with his online students and said: "Unyte is a plug-in for Skype which allows you to share your desktop, transfer files, share application all while using Skype to talk to the remote user. The plug-in is available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 users right now with a Mac OS X version on the way." For what reasons does he use it with students? "I've also used Windows Remote Desktop or Apple Remote Desktop to manage a remote user's desktop to help fix technical problems or show how to use an application on the user's system."