Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1

Friday September 29th 2006, 12:58 pm

Written by: Brian Benzinger

Related Articles:

Office 2.0 Conference and Birthday
I've just returned from San Francisco for the Office 2.0 Conference and had a blast. I met so many people, enjoyed watching the presentations and...
I’m alive!
Hey everyone. Sorry for the lack of posts and updates the last week or two. It's been a busy couple weeks on my end. I've...
Proofing Marks from Designers Toolbox
Designers Toolbox is a excellent resource that offers a large selection of tools for online and print. I came across one page that brought me...

Article Tags:
, , ,

Bookmark this Article:
Post at Del.icio.us and Add to BlinkList

With the start of the new school year, many teachers and students are seeking new products and technologies to help them through their upcoming academics. With the increase of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise. To me, the growing interest for web-based learning is amazing, which brought me to thinking; what if I were to consolodate some of the helpful online products and services that can help students, teachers and administrators alike? Well, I convinced myself. The following is a compilation of Web 2.0 products that I’ve personally researched and tested. These services are grouped into two main categories: “Tools”; and “Office Applications”. Some more specific services include: organizers, gradebooks, research tools, document managers, diagrams, and more.

There are going to be three parts to the “Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0″ series: part one covering tools; part two covering office applications; and in part three, real cases of Web 2.0 used in classrooms around the world. I hope that this series becomes a valuable resource for students, teachers, and school administrators alike. On a last note, part two is almost complete and I expect to publish it within a day or two followed by part three shortly after.

Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 2
Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 3

Red Arrows indicate personal favorites with education in mind.
Products may appear more than once if related to multiple categories.

Part 1: Tools

Organizers

  • Stu.dicio.us: Student organizer and social notetaking tool where students can create a schedule, track their grades, manage a to do list, store files for classes, and write public notes in an outline-like format. Stu.dicio.us also allows students to connect with friends and soon will include Facebook integration. More on Stu.dicio.us.
  • Gradefix: Best described by Gradefix, “Gradefix intelligently organizes and prioritizes all of your homework so you are always on top of it.” Students that use Gradefix create a study schedule used to best spreadout and prioritize homework throughout the week in hopes to decrease stress and improve grades.
  • Chalksite (Teachers): Chalksite is a system built for teachers, students, and parents providing teachers with an easy to use central point where they can communicate with students and parents, post assignments and grades, send messages, and manage a website for their courses. More on Chalksite.
  • Engrade (Teachers): Similar to Chalksite, Engrade allows teachers to create an account and have direct communication with students and their parents. Teachers can manage student grades, track attendance, schedule upcoming homework, and provide students and parents progress reports.
  • mynoteIT: (New release came out the other day) An online note taking tool for students including a WYSIWYG note editor, assignment reminders, grade management, to do lists, and more. Students can also share notes with friends and receive feedback through commenting on notes.
  • Haiku LMS (Teachers): Haiku has yet to launch, but its feature set sounds promising making it worth mentioning. Haiku provides a system for teachers where they can create a public website for their classes, manage content, list assignments and announcements, track grades, and more. Sounds like a similar application to Chalksite.
  • CollegeRuled: Academic organizer, class scheduler, and message board area for students. Students can either create a schedule or connect to their Facebook schedule with CollegeRuled and take notes and manage a to do list for each class. Note: I have not been able to test CollegeRuled as it requires an .edu email address.
  • Backpack: Backpack is an all around great organizer including note taking, file storage, to do lists, a calendar, and more. An example use could be that students can create pages in their organizer for each class and manage notes on class discussions as well as upload related files and class documents.
  • PocketMod: This isn’t really a “Web 2.0″ product, but I felt it’s worth mentioning. Pocketmod is a small tool for creating disposable paper organizers using print out templates covering just about anything from note paper to reference sheets. It’s perfect for students that prefer keeping organized on paper. Also, it’s just helpful to carry around with you for whenever you may need to jot some things down.
  • JotSpot: JotSpot is a free wiki allowing users to create and share documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and more. It is my top pick for a wiki and provides a great set of features. Users can even install other applications from an application gallery to extend their wiki with project managers, to do lists, photo galleries, and other applications. It may be a little on the advanced side for students and teachers, but if your tech savvy, have at it.

Gradebooks

  • Teacher! (Teachers): Teacher, formerly known as Teacherly, is an online grading tool for teachers where they can create classes, add students, and track grades for all assignments and test scores. I would imagine it would work out fine for students as well wanting to track their own grades in classes. Unfortunately, Teacher is not accepting new users at this time but you can signup to be notified when they do and check out a demo in the meantime.
  • Stu.dicio.us: Built into the Stu.dicio.us organizer comes a very simple grade manager allowing students to assign grade categories (homework, quiz, tests, etc.) and grades to each of their classes.
  • mynoteIT: Students with an mynoteIT account can login and access their classes where they can add grade sections and grades. What’s nice too is that unlike Stu.dicio.us, mynoteIT gives the student a clear look with letter grades rather then just percentages and averages.
  • Chalksite (Teachers): Designed for teacher, student, and parent communication, Chalksite provides teachers with online gradebooks where they select their class and simply fill in grades for each assignment that they have sent to their students. Students and parents can then login to their account to view their grades.
  • Engrade (Teachers): The Engrade online gradebook is built to be flexible to a teachers needs where they can add assignments, create weighted grading categories, customize grading scales (A, B, C, Pass, Fail, etc.), and more. Students and parents can also login and view their grade report.

For Teachers, Clubs, and Management

  • Groupvine: A service designed to help bring group members together to keep track of events, tasks, and news. Great for students in clubs, professors teaching specific topics, and campus management. For a screencast, view Screeniac.
  • Nuvvo: Teachers wanting to teach online can use Nuvvo providing them with their own online learning portal. Teachers can can add courses that anyone can find and enroll in as well as charge for the online courses. They can manage students, class curriculum, quizzes, and more importantly, learn pages (allowing for headings, text, files, images, and video) that their students will be reading throughout the course.
  • Schoopy: Built to strengthen community communication, Schoopy provides a system in which teachers can manage participating teachers, students, and parents and send messages, ask questions, keep up with assignments and even take quizes. Communities/Schools also can create a public website making it easy for students and parents to keep up with recent updates.
  • Tuggle: Tuggle, launching Fall 2006, is a web-based organization tool for student leaders to manage groups, online payments, bulk email and texting, and more.
  • Chalksite: A web package developed for teachers to help create a class website and a central point of communication with students and parents. Manage class assignments, student grades, and even a public blog.
  • Engrade: “Engrade is a free online gradebook that allows teachers to manage their classes online as well as post grades, assignments, attendance, and upcoming homework online for students and parents to see.”
  • Haiku LMS: Haiku has yet to launch, but its feature set sounds promising making it worth mentioning. Haiku provides a system for teachers where they can create a public website for their classes, manage content, list assignments and announcements, track grades, and more. Sounds like a similar application to Chalksite.
  • Zoho Challenge: Online test tool where you can easily create tests, send tests to candidates (students, in this case), and view results with visual reports and straight forward grading (pass or fail).

Mathematics

  • Calcoolate: Calcoolate provides users with a simple calculator with advanced expression support, mathematic functions, and history for viewing past calculations.
  • Calcr: Similar to Calcoolate, Calcr is a web-based calculator with mathematic expression and function support as well as history logging in a very minimalist design.
  • Create a Graph: Create a Graph is a free tool by Students’ Classroom that aims to make it easy for students to create bar graphs, line graphs, area graphs, pie charts, and point graphs. Navigate through its easy to understand visual interface to add data and customize graphs.
  • e-Tutor Graphing Calculator: Advanced web-based graphing calculator allowing students to enter one or more equations and view them with position/intersection indicators and zooming functionality.

Resume Building

  • Emurse: Great service built for job hunters that want to create, send, and share a professional resume. Users can view their resume’s statistics, send out their resume via fax and ground mail, and receive a public or private web address. One of my favorite applications of the year. More on Emurse.
  • hResume Creator: Helpful tool for the tech savvy crowd that want to create a Microformat compatible resume for their website. Simply fill out the hResume form covering basic resume information and retrieve an HTML file which you can use to copy-n-paste into your website. You can then style the resume as you wish with basic CSS if your not thrilled with the default appearance.
  • Amiko: Amiko does not appear to work or be officially launched yet, but I have been keeping an eye on it for the last month or so and hope to try it out soon. It appears to be a service that allows users to create and manage an online resume although it’s feature set does not look all that promising compared to Emurse. Note: The signup form doesn’t seem to work for me and I’ve tried reporting it as a bug, but the bug form did not work either. I’ll keep my eye on it.

To Do’s and Note Taking

Note: I did not list all of the note taking solutions I am aware of as I’ve already made a roundup of 50 notetaking tools here at Solution Watch, but I will add a few new student specific ones that I have recently come across.

  • 25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive: Solution Watch roundup of 25 web-based task managers that can be helpful for students wanting to keep track of homework and upcoming quizzes. Be sure to check visitor comments for more.
  • Fifty Ways to Take Notes: Another Solution Watch roundup including over 50 ways to take notes using various web-based tools in seven categories.
  • NoteMesh: Best described by NoteMesh, “There are plenty of notes services out there; NoteMesh is a different way of thinking about your notes. Collaborate with your classmates to create a unified set of notes for your class. It’s like Wikipedia for your notes.” Note: School email address required when registering.
  • Notecentric: Notecentric is a new notetaking site designed to help university students have their notes wherever they are and easily share them with fellow classmates. You can add multiple classes to your account and save notes to them using a WYSIWYG editor. Note: School email address required when registering.
  • NoteTango: Free and collaborative note sharing site, launched just days ago, that allows students to create and share notes online and search notes created by other students.

Learning and Research

  • EasyBib: An “automatic bibliography composer” that lets users enter sources and fill out a simple forms to be given MLA style bibliographies. I’ve used this multiple times in the past for research papers.
  • Ottobib: Similar to EasyBib, Ottobib is a simple bibliography tool that allows users to enter multiple ISBN numbers for books at a time and retrieve the bibliographies in MLA, APA, AMA, or Chicago/Turabian format.
  • Nuvvo: Nuvvo offers a service where students can search for courses to enroll in online on any just about any topic. It’s a fun and easy way for students to learn and they can select from free or paid courses.
  • Diigo: Social annotation and bookmarking service where users can bookmark sites and add highlights and notes to them. Great for research. In fact, I used Diigo to help organize bookmarks and notes for this post.
  • Wizlite: “Wizlite allows you to highlight text (like on real paper) on any page on the Internet and share it with everybody (or just your friends).”
  • Mindpicnic: Similar to Nuvvo, Mindpicnic offers a service where users can create courses and find and study interesting courses full of media, links, flash cards, and more.
  • Answers.com: Excellent site for researching anything at all. Make a search and receive results from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other information sources.
  • Wikipedia: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia under a Wiki platform that is written and maintained by volunteers. It has possibly grown to be todays largest reference site and encyclopedia on the Internet.
  • Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking site where users can save bookmarks and organize them with tags. Users can also take advantage of their del.icio.us network allowing them to add friends to their account and keep track of bookmarks left by each friend.
  • Zotero: Next-generation research tool for Firefox that is currently in private beta. With Zotero, users can capture citation information, store media and websites, take notes, and more all within their browser. Note: Zotero is in private beta and I have not had the chance to try it out and will keep my eye on it.
  • Newsvine: I could have picked any ol’ news site for this post, but Newsvine is, in my opinion, the best news source for students. It’s a clean and friendly social news site containing articles from the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as user contributions. Students can browse the site comfortably, rate news articles, participate in article discussion, and even start their own news column where they can write and publish articles. More on Newsvine.

Media Sharing

  • Youtube: YouTube has quickly grown to be one of the most popular websites on the Internet. I personally use it for entertainment, although you can find a great deal of educational videos as well as create an account to upload your own videos for free. Students can research the site (may come across inappropriate content here and there) and even create projects with video and share them on the web.
  • Google Video: Similar to YouTube, Google Video allows users to search, upload, and share videos online for free. I’m a fan of YouTube, but Google comes on top when it comes to quality educational videos. Google Video even has an educational category providing hour long videos and caption/subtitled videos (new).
  • Flickr: Explore, upload, and share photos online. Includes commenting and neat note functionality where users can add blocks of notes on the photos themselves for others to see.
  • Eyespot: Neat site where users can actually create video mixes online and share them with others. You can add up to 100 clips or photos to a movie as well as add transition effects and video effects. Reminds me of videos I had to create back in High School for Graphic Communications class. More on Eyespot.

That about does it for part one of the series. If there are any services that you feel should be on this list, please comment and let us know about them! If you are interested in more services in any of the above categories, feel free to contact me as I have only mentioned ones that I personally felt were best for educational use. Also, I just want to make a last note that red arrows throughout the article indicate personal favorites of mine but do not mean they are the best options for you. I recommend looking at a category that you need improvement on and find what product will best fit your needs, then go from there. Hang tight for part two of the series and enjoy!

255 Comments

Leave a comment - RSS feed for comments on this post. - TrackBack URI

# 1. Jane Ricard on Sep 29, 2006 at 2:56 pm

Brian,

Thanks so much for this awesome list. I can’t wait to explore it. I am an assistive technology specialist, and I know I will find some great resources here for my teachers & students.

Jane Ricard

# 2. Alberto on Sep 29, 2006 at 4:18 pm

This is fantastic!

A very good space/set of tools for students and teachers: http://www.tiged.org

# 3. dave on Sep 29, 2006 at 4:56 pm

For media sharing, you are missing online gaming.

Try http://www.gamegum.com/

# 4. Kurt Nelson on Sep 29, 2006 at 4:59 pm

Add http://digication.com

# 5. Jason on Sep 29, 2006 at 4:59 pm

Carbonmade may be a good fit in the Media Sharing category.

# 6. Michael on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:07 pm

Just out of curiousity… why don’t any of the music download sites make it to web 2.0 lists… A couple of them, like last.fm, fit the criteria. Or is there something that they are missing that doesn’t classify them as 2.0?

~mt

# 7. Alex Rudloff on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:09 pm

Thank you for the kind words and continued support! :)

Best,

Alex Rudloff
Emurse.com

# 8. Mr K on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:10 pm

You forgot one for school interactivity and websites the kids can build http://www.site-creata.co.nz

# 9. Paolo Gagliardi on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:21 pm

This is a brilliant work! Very well done!

# 10. Brendan on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:32 pm

For “free” books you may be able to find ideas and used textbooks on http://www.whatsonmybookshelf.com It is a social book trading site and worth a look.

# 11. Will Pate on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:41 pm

I’ve heard from and read of quite a few social media educators and students that were big fans of Flock. Having it all wrapped in the web browser seems to make the social web easier to teach and students really like the web snippets bar when they are researching.

Cheers,

Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock

# 12. Nathan Dintenfass on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:46 pm

This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I’d be remiss to not point out Nicenet (http://www.nicenet.org), a non-profit organization that provides free web-based classroom tools to teachers. It’s not “Web 2.0″ (started in 1996), but it is used by a fair number of teachers around the world.

# 13. Brian Benzinger on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:47 pm

Thanks everyone for all the comments and suggestions. I’ll probably add a couple of them to the list when I get some free time.

Will Pate - Right you are, and in fact, I will be discussing that in Part 3 of this series. During research, I found many teachers that have students blog recommend them to use Flock so they can easily bookmark links, store photos, and post without leaving the browser. Definitely cool and surely simplifies things. Keep checking back for part 3 where I’ll discuss this further.

# 14. Brian Benzinger on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:56 pm

#6 Michael - To answer your comment, “Just out of curiousity… why don’t any of the music download sites make it to web 2.0 lists… A couple of them, like last.fm, fit the criteria. Or is there something that they are missing that doesn’t classify them as 2.0?” I’m not sure why other lists don’t mention them, but I did not mention it simply because I don’t see as Last.fm being a tool that’s beneficial to education like the others. I do absolutely love Last.fm though.

#12 Nathan - Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll have to check it out.

#7 Alex - No prob for the mention. As I said in the comment, love the service. Keep it up!

#4 Kurt - Thanks for pointing me to Digication.com. The service looks excellent. I’ll be testing it tonight.

# 15. dave on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:57 pm

dude your list kicks ASS - would you PLEASE do something like this for just this market (education and related): http://itredux.com/office-20/database/ (they are using dabbledb for an office related dbase)

# 16. Hogg on Sep 29, 2006 at 6:05 pm

Very nice list. I will be sure to start using some of these in my classroom.

# 17. David Brannan on Sep 29, 2006 at 6:18 pm

For creating online quizzes, tests, exams, drill and practice try www.examprofessor.com

# 18. Paul Stamatiou on Sep 29, 2006 at 6:19 pm

Great post Brian, as usual.

# 19. Sridhar Vembu on Sep 29, 2006 at 6:20 pm

In addition to Zoho Challenge, we at Zoho are finding a lot of interest from students and educators for Zoho Writer http://www.zohowriter.com online word processor, as well as Zoho Creator http://zohocreator.com for creating quick online database/web applications. The entire suite can be found at http://zoho.com

Thanks,
Sridhar

# 20. Jim Cutrell on Sep 29, 2006 at 6:36 pm

You should check out Famundo, http://www.famundo.com. They have a version of their product for schools and other groups for free.

# 21. Jon Bischke on Sep 29, 2006 at 6:48 pm

Shameless plug of my own for LearnOutLoud. Largest directory (AFAIK) of free educational audio and video content can be found here:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio-Video

# 22. k on Sep 29, 2006 at 7:44 pm

I still miss an app like Genius for Mac! It is being developed too slowly and still does not support multimedia. Sharing would also be a welcome feature …

http://web.mac.com/jrc/Genius/

Still the concept is GREAT (and quite unique as far as I know):

“Genius helps you memorize things. Genius organizes your information and carefully chooses questions using an intelligent “spaced repetition” method that’s based on your past performance. It performs fuzzy answer checking and even highlights errors visually.

Use Genius to study foreign language phrases, vocabulary words, historical events, legal definitions, formal speeches, marketing points, religious texts—anything you need to memorize!”

# 23. Chris on Sep 29, 2006 at 11:42 pm

Wow! There are a lot of different tools out there. Great list!

# 24. Ryan on Sep 29, 2006 at 11:49 pm

Great list… I’m really getting into eLearning and what the web 2.0 era can do for it. I had no idea there were this many tools for learning!

# 25. Horan Show on Sep 29, 2006 at 11:56 pm

http://www.metaglossary.com is pretty slick for looking up unfamiliar terms.

# 26. EngProf on Sep 30, 2006 at 3:03 am

I’ve found that EasyBib is too simplistic to use with my high school students, who are citing a wide variety of sources. Another company named NoodleTools has an MLA and APA bibliography composer called NoodleBib that I highly recommend:

http://www.noodletools.com/

And by the way, they now have a note-taking feature built right in to NoodleBib, so it fits into that category in your list too.

# 27. Edutech Watch on Sep 30, 2006 at 3:36 am

Leo Laporte just posted an awesome podcast interview on digication: http://www.twit.tv/itn35

# 28. vickeybird on Sep 30, 2006 at 4:10 am

Very good and comprehensive list.

# 29. Rudy on Sep 30, 2006 at 12:35 pm

Great list, nice work involved. BTW, another good site for free intro college material is www.college-cram.com

# 30. G. R. Lucas on Sep 30, 2006 at 1:06 pm

Thank you for this excellent resource. An an educator, I’m glad to see that developers are beginning to use Web 2.0 apps for my field, especially in book keeping and student organization.

# 31. Danny on Sep 30, 2006 at 1:52 pm

Very useful post. Thank you. I cant wait for parts 2, 3, and 4.

# 32. Bob on Sep 30, 2006 at 2:01 pm

Nice list - but you really missed the boat by not selecting NoodleBib Express as a favorite. It’s the only one of the free citation creators that is accurate - in this case you get more than you pay for!

# 33. Maria on Sep 30, 2006 at 2:05 pm

Just notice the last comment - that’s the one my kids use for Science Fair Project citations — I send them to the answers when they have questions http://www.noodletools.com/kb/

# 34. andres on Sep 30, 2006 at 3:23 pm

For research papers there is nothing like CiteULike at http://www.citeulike.org

# 35. Dave on Oct 01, 2006 at 11:55 am

If I only had some of these apps in college - it might have been a lot easier to pass. Do they have cram4exam2.0 yet?

# 36. Taylor on Oct 01, 2006 at 7:25 pm

Thanks for the amazing compilation of tools (I’ve discovered a few goodies new to me), and thanks for the nice writeup.

# 37. Scott Hurff on Oct 02, 2006 at 12:17 am

Thanks Brian! I’m grateful for the coverage and the endorsement.

For anyone that has tried or is trying Groupvine, I’m always open to feedback and recommendations on what you’d like to see in the next version.

This is also a fantastic list of resources — you really did your homework on this one (pun intended). Yes, that was lame.

# 38. Fred on Oct 02, 2006 at 10:28 pm

Brian, this post rocked. Came back to it today after bookmarking and really enjoyed it. Keep up the great work as always.

# 39. Atom Probe on Oct 06, 2006 at 6:46 pm

Zotero is now in public beta.

I’ve been using it since the private beta. The ability to import embedded metadata is a killer feature.

I’ve been using this with the web-based refbase.

# 40. nimsey on Oct 07, 2006 at 12:25 pm

I use quia.com to make quizzes and gaggle.net for student email, messageboards, and blogs

# 41. Sharon Peters on Oct 07, 2006 at 5:24 pm

Wow! An impressive array of 2.0 tools! Two initiatives you should know about:

Upcoming conference = K12 Online Conference - http://k12onlineconference.org/

Women of Web 2.0
http://www.womenofweb2.com/

We just started the latter earlier this week - hopefully it will be an ongoing endeavor. I will be certain to link this blog article to the site.

Thanks!

# 42. Peter Giger on Oct 08, 2006 at 12:15 pm

Great post, but as someone said, where is the second best web 2.0-service (next to Flickr of course) Last.fm?

# 43. Jake on Oct 08, 2006 at 10:55 pm

I got another for you list.

http://www.educationsearch.net

An education search tool which enables you to search by: Location, Career, Industry/Salary and provides personalized searches to save for future reference. Utilizes Flickr, Google Maps and YouTube.

# 44. Tony van der Kuyl on Oct 09, 2006 at 6:22 am

Dear Brian,
you are to be congratulated fine piece of much needed development, how can we sustain this ?
your aye
tony v

# 45. chen bo on Oct 09, 2006 at 6:24 am

Wonderful. thank you very much!
waiting for the coming of part 3.

# 46. jack lynch on Oct 17, 2006 at 11:24 pm

There’s a new GTD based web tool for organizing: Neptune.

# 47. Neal on Oct 20, 2006 at 12:21 pm

There is a question and answer site launched for students to share their advice, opinions and knowledge with other students. it is called http://answeru.com.

Currently, its launched at MIT. Might not be useful for other people.

# 48. Helen on Oct 20, 2006 at 10:39 pm

Regarding the Web 2.0 Apps for communities, do you know of any that are free/or very cheap and can be used to co-ordinate communications on a Village Community website.

We have about 4ooo people living in our mountain community and we as the local web developers, want to establish a living communication hub/potal website that has an interface open to the public and a member login section that runs using web 2.0 apps.
We’d like it to be dynamic using web 2.0 applications to make it interesting and simple to run.

Have you any suggestions?

I look forward to your response.

Cheers!

helen

# 49. Jack on Oct 21, 2006 at 3:26 pm

Great list!

# 50. Leanna on Oct 22, 2006 at 10:28 am

Thank you very much for this extensive list of resources. As a new teacher, I found engrade.com very useful and easy to use

# 51. Derek on Oct 22, 2006 at 1:42 pm

YackPack is another very cool web 2.0 tool. It allows you to have audio based groups. Perfect for teacher-student, student-student, parent-teacher interaction. Also a great tool for online learning.

http://yackpack.com/education.html

# 52. Bryan Menell on Oct 23, 2006 at 11:01 pm

Shamless plug for NanoLearning where we’re trying to get past the class/teacher/student paradigm and making Learning 2.0 more of a social experience. Launched at DEMOfall ‘06. Cheers!

# 53. Ivana Lages on Oct 30, 2006 at 8:18 am

I am astonished! I still have to visit and search it all before leaving a real commet. But now I feel like the future of Education is just starting.
Great.

# 54. A Garcia on Nov 02, 2006 at 8:57 am

Excellent compilation here. Thanks. As an educator and technology enthusiast, I have a keen interest in WEB2.0 implications/applications..especially possibilities for Education. Your blog has been bookmarked as you have provided so many resources in this three part series.
Thanks….I’m happy to put some of these sites to the test with classes/students. Let me know if I can offer assistance in any way (ie..feedback..what works..)

# 55. Brandt Schneider on Nov 07, 2006 at 6:47 pm

I’ve been adding a lot of these tools to my web design class but I’m hitting a wall. My Blogjust added the translator tool and the audio broadcasts. Both are blocked for students. Tech people say translators are the way around the filter (you could download porn in Polish for example) so they block them all. And the block audio for a similar reason.

Any ideas on how to solve this? Its killing me not to be able to launch podcasts or other cool things.

# 56. Vanessa on Nov 07, 2006 at 8:29 pm

i love it

# 57. Morgan on Nov 08, 2006 at 8:02 am

Very entertaining issue. I haven’t heard of this one. It will be necessary to visit you on a thicket!

# 58. Jon Bourne on Nov 18, 2006 at 6:50 am

It would sure be nice if the Art Institute Online read through this post. Their classroom interface could definitely use some improvement.

# 59. Oliver on Dec 15, 2006 at 5:16 am

up the ally of this article

# 60. Oliver on Dec 15, 2006 at 5:16 am

i meant to post the link www.hoovle.com for your consideration :)

# 61. Brainplugg on Jan 24, 2007 at 3:52 pm

E-learning is a growing business and brainplugg is showing us literally, with online video.
Brainplugg is the online video sharing community dedicated to learning. Imaging being able to view streaming media from thousands of different educational categories anytime, anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. Now students, teachers, employers, and many more professionals, have a place to collaborate and view educational media. The possibilities are endless when thousands of minds from around the world upload and contribute to Brainplugg.

Beta testing is scheduled to start the first week of February. Sign up now @ www.brainplugg.com

# 62. bonita006 on Feb 14, 2007 at 12:19 am

this is very helpful, I hope I will get to use it to help my studies in Mulitmedia.

# 63. Eyalithe on Feb 21, 2007 at 11:53 am

Woah, this place is sooo cool!

# 64. settouramane on Feb 26, 2007 at 3:23 am

need the e - learning pacakages for 10th students

# 65. Andrew on Mar 02, 2007 at 5:55 pm

I would also reccomend calc5.com online symbolic calculator. It could do some advanced staff like differentiation and 3 graph plotting.

# 66. Wyoming on Apr 03, 2007 at 1:23 am

Just dropping in to let you know you have an interesting site. I hope you’ll continue to work on it. Wishing you all the best.

# 67. Mark on Jun 17, 2007 at 12:12 am

This is a good place to find few more…. http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub

# 68. Kimmie on Jun 24, 2007 at 5:42 pm

Another tool for student-run organizations is CollegeMailer. It is used at NYU Stern and is helpful for a club officer in managing membership, sending targeted emails, creating web pages, creating events with RSVPs, collecting membership or event fees, and more.

# 69. baird on Jul 03, 2007 at 5:59 pm

don’t forget www.teachertube.com
baird

# 70. MagnoliaSouth on Aug 13, 2007 at 1:06 pm

How about an update for the new school year? Schools in Mobile, AL and Atlanta, GA are already in session. Thanks for this article. It’s very handy.

# 71. Jess on Aug 22, 2007 at 6:20 pm

this list is a great place to start, as a student teacher starting out in the wide world of web 2.0 in the classroom. so thankyou

# 72. Ezra Katz on Aug 28, 2007 at 10:19 pm

LectureShare.com may be a useful tool for teachers. It is a free course management system that allows teachers to post text, audio, video or document announcements. You can take a look at a sample course site that was created through LectureShare, http://www.lectureshare.com/main.php?course=51 . If you are interested check it out, it has some cool features for students and teachers.

# 73. Jeanette on Sep 22, 2007 at 3:06 pm

the gradebook will be useful for all teachers and collegeruled good thing for students

# 74. Michael on Sep 27, 2007 at 5:04 pm

How about http://www.only2clicks.com simple visual bookmarking tool

# 75. Olivier on Oct 29, 2007 at 1:59 pm

Check out http://www.erudix.com

It is a collaborative website for students and professors where they can share their work with an easy-to-use and powerful wiki.

# 76. GN on Dec 27, 2007 at 1:27 pm

Thank you for your hard work. I really value this information and all the additions from the contributors. I hope to use some of the tools in my institution.

# 77. Julie B on Feb 09, 2008 at 8:11 pm

My girlfriend purchased a backpack for her son which seems to be very cool and innovative - and comfort oriented. It’s called Ivar Pack (www.ivarpack.com), and it has a shelf design inside of it. It basically creates great comfort and weight distribution of her son’s stuff! Anyway, here’s the info:

Ivar Pack
http://www.ivarpack.com

# 78. Jane on Feb 09, 2008 at 8:15 pm

i’ve heard of the Ivar Pack, or Ivar Backpack. They’re very new and are based out of the San Francisco Bay Area by a very young entrepreneur -Ian Ivarson. You can buy them on eBags.com if interested, in addition to some retailers and catalogs. Ivar Pack is great for organization and comfort (as all your stuff doesn’t sit on the bottom of the pack as in a typical backpack). The “Ivar System” shelf design creates great weight distribution of your stuff.

http://www.ivarpack.com

# 79. Samir Koosah on Mar 14, 2008 at 8:49 am

I recently have been presented to an interesting new concept (at least for me). I am testing their services and possibilities in the last few days and they have overpassed my expectations. I encourage you to test it too and pass the word ahead, so we can help anyone who might need this kind of tecnology.
I could talk a lot about it, but none can say it better than themselves:

ReadTheWords.com began as a simple concept in January 2008: To assist students with learning disabilities with their studies, by means of auditory learning and auditory processing.
To that end we seeked out programers, technologies, and research departments from around the world and came up with a very basic platform, far less sophisticated than what you currently see on our website. Although we had originally intended this site to be used for auditory learning, through our researching efforts we found that the demand for this technology reaches far beyond our originally intended audience. Many other students, young professionals, actors and actresses, research departments, bloggers, ecommerce sites, and others, expressed how this technology could help them with their daily lives, and their businesses.
For this reason, we went back to the drawing board and added more features to meet more users’ needs. ReadTheWords created multiple input methods for users to create readings. We also greatly expanded our efforts to allow users take full advantage of the created readings as mp3’s. In particular, we found that Bloggers are constantly looking for ways to reach a larger audience and we, in turn, have found a way to meet this need by enabling them to create podcasts and share them with their readers. We also created a platform for bloggers and website operators to paste an audio toolbar in their website or blog, making it possible for any reader to become a listener. The feedback has been overwhelming and we continue to add new features and users to our site each day.
So, all this may lead you to wonder about the full extent of the possibilities that this technology presents. The answer is truly limitless. We encourage you to try our free service and let us know how you’ve been able to use it to your meet your own needs.

I invite you all to test it for yourself, just register at www.readthewords.com/default.aspx and tell us what you think about it.
Have fun!!!!