Serendipity35

I wonder what will become of some of the Google Labs projects now that Google+ is here?  Google Shared Spaces - one of the Wave off-shoots - is a good example of something that would either duplicate G+ or just get rolled into it.

Free hosted online courses from Blackboard. Really? It's not what you expect from the big vendor in learning management systems.

But there is the offer at https://www.coursesites.com It's explained on their blog as:

Put simply, it’s a free version of our latest learning management system for individual instructors.  And I mean fully free – no software license, no hosting fee, and no charge for support.  And if our beta program is an indicator of interest in this new program, it’s gonna be a barn-burner.  We’ve already seen participation from thousands of individual instructors.

I haven't been able to find anyone who has actually used it to teach a course, (If you have, please post a comment below!) so I have no review. As my school is already a Blackboard user, I don't have as great a need to try it out. (More on that below)

Why would a commercial provider make such an offer? One response by the company is that there are still important emerging markets where the standard enterprise adoption model is an obstacle for their business (K12 and pockets within the international Higher Ed market).  Those obviously have big growth potential for an LMS vendor.  How do you get them on board?  Word of mouth and a few faculty advocates would be important.

Blackboard and other commercial vendors recognize that open source LMSs allow much easier and broader sampling, so they are using that open source model. As advertised, Blackboard's offer is to try without the barrier of purchase.

You sign up online at www.coursesites.com and without any downloads or installation, you can begin using their latest version. It's a variation on the “freemium” model.

It also gets faculty to try out the newest product. Blackboard can't be thrilled that 60% of their customers are still on older versions. If I do try CourseSites out, it will be to use the newest version of their product since my college is still using an older version and is reluctant to update and retrain faculty.

Finally, Blackboard is offering you additional platform and partner technologies including Blackboard Collaborate instant messaging, live conferencing and voice tools, Respondus assessment and locked browser tools and content authoring from SoftChalk, new course templates and themes.

If I had the time (or someone paid me to have the time!), I could post several new technology and learning tools every day. THere are an incredible number of tools and services in EdTech being made available. That's great - and that's a problem. There is so much that many good things simply get lost in the pile.

Most teachers can't keep up with. If they are lucky, their school has someone or a department of someones who are able to keep up with what is new and point instructors to things that might work in their particular classroom.

A good example is some thing I stumbled upon that is worth looking at if you are a user of Google Apps for Education.

Flubaroo is a tool that can be used with Google Forms to do formative assessment. It is a free script that was developed by a
Googler during that "20% time" that Google employees get to work on a project of interest. (Some of those projects get into the Google Lab and end up becoming something that is offered to the public. Do you know any schools that offer paid 20% time to teachers to develop resources? Just a thought...)

Flubaroo helps teachers grade assessments quickly and easily. It's a bit limited at this point in the types of assessments that it grades but it is useful and may expand if it gets use. You can grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments, compute average assignment score, average score per question, and flag low-scoring questions. It shows you a grade distribution graph and gives you the option to email each student their grade, and an answer key.

Watch a 3 minute Flubaroo demo

Wikispaces.com is now offering free wikis to higher education. When they launched more than five years ago, they announced plans to make 100,000 of their wikis ad-free and private, load them up with extra features and then give them away to K-12 educators. That went so well, they decided to give away 250,000 more. And they kept going.

I have used Wikispaces for wikis a number of times. One example is the End of the Essay wiki I created for a podcast series that I helped Dr. Norbert Elliot put together at NJIT.  I have also had students create wikis as projects using the site.

According to their blog, they have given away 980,000+ free classroom wikis for K-12 education, and now they are extending their commitment to give away 2 million total free wikis for education. The features in these free educational wikis normally cost $50 per year, but are completely free when used for K-12 or higher education.

Teachers, students, professors, researchers, librarians — anyone can use their wikis in K-20 education. If your wiki will be used exclusively in higher education, you're eligible for one of the Higher Education plan wikis. On this complimentary plan, you’ll get a free wiki with more complete privacy settings, our User Creator tool to create student accounts in bulk, and other great features. Get your free Higher Education plan wiki.

If your wiki will be used exclusively for primary and secondary education, those wikis are free and ad-free, and you can make them private. You can also open student accounts in bulk — without student email addresses. Create a free K-12 plan wiki