PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education
Thanks to a link from Ken Sadowski, I stumbled across this free online guide by Micah Ovadia offering practical tips regarding podcasting in education. This is appears to be a great resource for anyone looking at getting into more of the finer aspects of podcasting and is definitely worth bookmarking for future reference.
Edublogs Campus Announced
Edublogs sent out the following email announcing their new campus hosting service. Looks promising…
Dear Edublogger,
Today we’d like to share something really special with you, our new blogging system for schools, colleges and other institutions, Edublogs Campus.
It’s a simple, powerful and safe way to bring blogs to your school. You can host the site at your own domain (i.e. blogs.yourschool.edu), create, manage and control all blogs on the site and get unlimited email (and even telephone) support from us.
We’ll also set up, host and maintain the software all for you… so you don’t need to worry about any technical details. And every Campus client has unlimited bandwidth and storage space too!
You can find out about these and more features at http://edublogs.org/campus
If you’d like to discuss how Edublogs Campus could work for your school or organization, please just reply to this email or contact us through the site.
We’re more than happy to answer any questions you might have and look forward to taking your organization to the next edublogging level!
Thanks for taking the time to read this email.
Cheers, James Farmer
Founder, Edublogs
The Other 85 Percent
Mike Offerman, vice chairman of Capella University, is authoring a new blog on critical issues facing the future of higher education. Research shows that only about 15 percent of higher education students still fit the traditional definition of a college student: age 18 to 22, living on campus, and going to school full time. That is the inspiration for The Other 85 Percent (www.theother85percent.com), a new blog by Capella University Vice Chairman Mike Offerman that challenges the traditional view of how to best serve today’s college students.
Kaltura: Collaborative Video Editing Online
I just stumbled across Kaltura, a free collaborative online video editing tool. Similar to other online media editors like Jumpcut, Kaltura “…is a free online site for group video making. For the first time, users are given the ability to CREATE RICH MEDIA TOGETHER. Like the Wiki platform that enables users to collaborate on the creation of texts from any browser, Kaltura enables a group of users to collaborate on the creation of a video.”
Here’s a video introduction to Kaltura.
Check out the tour and give Kaltura a try. I’m looking forward to trying out Kaltura myself and would love to hear from others regarding your experiences with this or any other online video editing tool. This technology and others involving media mashups open the door to some considerable new pedagogical options for active learning and collaborative group work. How might you use this technology in your learning environment?
Blackboard Scholar & SafeAssign
Blackboard has recently released two new web services as part of its “Blackboard Beyond” initiative…Scholar and SafeAssign. Scholar is basically an academic resource sharing (aka: “social bookmarking”) service that is integrated within Blackboard. SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service that again is incorporated into Blackboard.NIU has recently just rolled out both Scholar and SafeAssign. As part of this process, I’ve just developed online resource pages for both Scholar and SafeAssign with a considerable amount of the textual documentation provided by the Scholar Wiki and SafeAssign Wiki.These new documentation pages are available at
- http://www.blackboard.niu.edu/blackboard/resources/safeassign.shtml
- http://www.blackboard.niu.edu/blackboard/resources/scholar.shtml
In the future, our office is planning to develop several “Quick Tips” presentations highlighting these new tools as well as devote future episodes of the Teaching with Blackboard Podcast to addressing best practices in further depth. Anyone else already implemented Scholar and SafeAssign at your campus? What has been your experience thus far?