Innovations in Teaching & Learning
One of the goals of the Center for Academic and Professional Excellence (CAPE) is to provide faculty and staff with innovations on the newest tools, technologies, and learning trends. Through workshops and literature we hope to inform the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) community on what these tools are and how they may be used. The majority of these tools are accessible free through the web and are simple to use.
CAPE promotes ongoing institutional learning to improve and sustain excellence. We offer a variety of different workshops and one-on-one consultations.
Please feel free to e-mail Thomas Scott - Faculty Training Manager if you are interested in any of these tools for learning. We would also like to hear of any tools that you are using.
All of these tools and software have been featured on numerous sites listing the top tools in learning such as: 100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner, Top 100 Tools for Learning, Teach Web 2.0, Open Source Windows and 2008 WebWare 100 Winners.
Blogging
There are many free blogging sites available that are an easy way to create and maintain a blog. A blog is an easily created website that allows an author to update and publish instantly from any internet connection. This website can be comprised of reflections and observations and are usually updated everyday. Blogs can engage your readers by providing links to other sites and asking users to reflect and comment on posts. Blogs are a great way to build a community of writers. Bloggers were named by ABC as the "2004 People of the Year". Check out this video created by Commoncraft about "Blogs in Plain English"
Blogger - Blogger is one of the largest and easiest to use blogging sites. This weblog serivce is owned by Google. Check out this video if you want to learn more about how to use Blogger.
Edublogs - Edublogs hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs for teachers, students, researchers, professors, librarians, administrators and anyone and everyone else involved in education. There are many online tutorials located on the Edublogs Video Tutuorial page.
Wordpress.com - Wordpress.com allows people to create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge previously needed with the original Wordpress. Watch this tubetorial about "WhyWordPress.com Rocks"
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Instant Messaging/VOIP
Instant messaging and chatting is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via instant messaging programs over the internet. What makes instant messaging so valuable is the fact that it is a form of synchronous communication. Meaning communication is live and instant not static like e-mail. Voice over Interent Protocol (VOIP) is a protocol that allows voice communication or transmission over the internet. Both of these tools are ways to communicate with others in real time from your pc or mobile device over the web.
Meebo - Meebo allows you to keep in touch with colleagues and students on any IM network (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber) through a MeeboRoom. Just go to meebo.com to chat with your buddies on every major IM network in a single buddylist. Login with the IM account you already have, there's nothing to download or install, and it's totally free.
Skype - Skype allows you to make free calls from your computer to other people anywhere in the world as long as they are logged on the Skype network. Skype also allows you to hold a conference call for up to nine users. When using a webcam Skype also allows you to make free video calls.
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Mind Mapping/Concept Mapping
A mind map is generally a diagram used to represent words and ideas linked together and arranged around a singular idea. There usually is a single image with connections between portions of information. Mind maps are an excellent tool to use when brainstorming and have been called a way to think visually. A concept map is a diagram that shows how concepts relate to one another by linking concepts with arrows. Concept maps are usually a hierarchical structure and take a constructivist approach to learning. Concept maps are a great way to use technology to represent a person's understanding of a domain of knowledge.
CMapTools - The IHMC Cmap Tools software empowers users to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as Concept Maps.
FreeMind - Freemind is a free open source mind-mapping softeware written in Java.
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Online Office Suites
Web-based office suites have made great strides over the last few years. They now offer many of the things that users need such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and many other tools associated with desktop office suites. Online suites allow you to create, edit and share documents. One thing that attracts many people is the fact that they are free and you only need access to the internet. In fact, many of these websites now allow you to work offline. Being web-based also has many other advantages such as allowing collaboration with others within the application. You and a colleague could work on a document in real time without ever having to meet face to face.
GoogleDocs - GoogleDocs offers three classic productivity applications: word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation editor. Google offers other services online that are normally associated with productivity suites such as Gmail and Google Calendar.
ThinkFree - ThinkFree Online is a Microsoft Office compatible office suite launched within your web browser or desktop client. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be created online, or uploaded from your desktop.
Zoho -Zoho is one of the most extensive Online Office Suites. They offer approximately 20 different products, some are free and some are not.
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Podcasting
A podcast is a series of digital-media files, which are distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and computers. The term podcast, like broadcast, can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also called podcasting. The host or Author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.
Audacity - Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
Gabcast - Gabcast.com is a podcasting and audioblogging platform that offers an easy way to create and distribute audio content. Most people will use a touch-tone telephone to make their recordings but we also provide worldwide access to the service through VoIP. Once you have made a recording and have published it, a newsfeed is immediately and automatically updated to alert subscribers to your channel.
iTunes U - iTunes U puts the power of the iTunes Store to work for colleges and universities, so users can easily search, download, and play course content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows. Click HERE to check out CSN's iTunes U Page.
Odeo - Odeo makes it easy to find, play and enjoy the latest audio & video from around the web. Discover great shows, subscribe to favorites, create playlists and share with friends. From comedy to cooking, entertainment to education, if it's online, it's on Odeo.
Photo Editing
Having to take the perfect picture is no longer necessary now that there are numerous photo editing/image altering software available. You can now take those terrible photos and turn them into works of art. Photo editing software allows you to retouch, recolor, crop and many other things in order to manipulate images.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) - GIMP is a freely distributed piece of open source software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. Click HERE to see some screenshots.
FotoFlexer - FotoFlexer is very powerful free Web based photo editing application that has features for the beginners and the more advanced users. FotoFlexer also allows users to integrate their photos with other photo sharing services such as Flickr, Photobucket, MySpace and Facebook. FotoFlexer was voted a Webware 100 Winner in the category of Publishing. Click HERE to watch a demo.
Paint.net - Paint.net is a free image and photo editing software for computers that run windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Paint.net was voted as PC World 101 Top Freebies and recieved a 4 star rating by CNET.com.
Picnik - Picnik is an award-winning online photo editor that makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools from any computer platform on any Internet browser. Tweak to your heart's content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes and frames. Time rated Picnik as one of the 50 Best Websites for 2008.
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Photo Storing/Image Sharing
Photo storing/sharing is a way to transfer digital images to an online environment and share them with others either privately or publicly. All you need to do is upload your photos to a website. Once uploaded you may link to the photos using blogs, wikis or other types of Web pages. You also can create photo albums or slide shows and share photos with other peers.
Flickr - Flickr is a photo-sharing community that enables users to upload hundreds of photos and tag each photo with descriptive words. Other users can then search on these tags, enabling them to find and comment on the photos of other users. Flickr's active community and addictive sharing features have attracted millions of users. Flickr was a 12th Annual Webby Award Winner.
Photobucket - Photobucket is a popular site on the Internet for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos, and graphics. With a free Photobucket account you can store thousands of photos and hours of video. Photobucket also offers free tools for making slideshows of photos, videos with music. You can share your photos and videos with friends by email, IM and mobile phone. Fortune lists Photobucket as "The biggest Web site you've never hear of."
Picasa - Picasa is free software from Google that helps you locate and organise all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos, and share your photos with others. Click HERE to take a look at Picasa web albums. Picasa was awarded PC Magazine's Editor Choice Award.
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Productivity
With such busy lives it is important to manage our time in order to reamain productive. Technology has taken leaps and bounds in order to take over some of the menial tasks in our lives, allowing us to focus on some of the more pertinent things.
Google Calendar - Google Calendar is a free web-based calendar which you can use for your personal activities or to share with others.
Microsoft Office Live Workspace - Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta is your online place to save, access, and share documents and files. Use it to group related information for work, school, or personal projects. No downloads are required – just sign up and go.
Remember the Milk - Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.
RSS Feed Reader/Aggregator
With the increase in information that is being housed on the web it has become difficult to keep track of it all. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) helps you consume information in a more relevant and efficient way. Many websites now generate code in XML usually referred to as a feed. This feed allows you to subscribe to your favorite online media such as websites, blogs, wikis and magazines so you no longer have visit them all the time for new updated information. All of this content will go to your aggregator (web-based feed or web reader) and allow you to create a personalized newspaper with only the stuff you want to read. This will allow you to cover more content from more sources in a shorter amount of time.
GoogleReader - GoogleReader is a free web-based reader to aggregate and read all your news and blog feeds. GoogleReader allows you to share your information with others and has recently entered the mobile market allowing you to read your news from your mobile phone browser.
Bloglines - Bloglines is a free web-based service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and news feeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines. There is also a handy desktop notifier that lets you know when new postings have come in. The Chicago Tribune rated Bloglines in 2006 as one of the 50 Best Web Sites: Services.
NetNewsWire -Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You've found it! The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs.
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Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to save, store, organize, share and manage bookmarks of Web pages online. Using a social bookmarking service users are able to save their favorite webpages online that can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. One of the most powerful tools is the ability to share your bookmarks with friends, colleagues and students. Many social bookmarking services also allow you to search bookmarks that have been saved by others with the same metadata. Watch this YouTube video created by Commoncraft about Social Bookmarking in Plain English.
Del.icio.us - Delicious is a free social bookmarking tool. Store your bookmarks online, tag them and share them with your colleagues and students. Easy to use to search for other bookmarked resources.
Digg - Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.
diigo - Diigo is a social annotation tool that allows you to higlight, clip and sticky-note any Web page and share your findings with others. If you browse or read a lot on the web, you will find Diigo indispensable. Diigo is two services in one -- it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other.
StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it's a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more. StumbleUpon was listed as Next Net 25: Ranked #1 in Social Media by CNNMoney.com.
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Social Networking
Social networking is a way of building online communities where people share their lives and activities with others. Whether it is friends, classmates, or co-workers a social network helps you make connections and begin to become a member of an online community. Many members of the communities created on social network sites share common interests such as place of employment, hobbies, religion or politics. The social part happens as a result of your firends becoming friends of those people who get access to your profile. Watch this CommonCraft video about Social Networking in Plain English.
Bebo - Bebo is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment.
Classroom 2.0 - Classroom 2.0 is a social network site created for those interested in the practical application of Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. Classroom 2.0 was voted as 2007 Edublogs Social Network Site.
Facebook - Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
LinkedIn - LinkedIn is a social network aimed at the professional community. You can manage your account online, and add a widget to identify yourself as a member of the community on your web/blog page.
MySpace - MySpace is a popular social netowrking site offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.
Ning - Ning is an online platform for users to create their own social websites and social networks.
Twitter - Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
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Video Hosting/Sharing
Video hosting service also called video sharing is a way for individuals to upload clips to an internet site. The video host stores the video on it's server and displays a code that allows users to view the individual types of codes associated with the video. This makes it an easy and free way to host videos on a website and share them with the world. Users also have the ability to copy the code and have the video imbedded in a blog, wiki, social network or other website.
TeacherTube - TeacherTube's goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. They seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.
YouTube - Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
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Wiki Tools
More and more people are turning to wiki’s for information. Wiki’s can be used to create collaborative spaces by showing the democratic process of knowledge creation. You may be asking yourself what is a wiki? In its simplest form a wiki is a website where anyone can edit anything anytime they want. For more information about what a wiki is watch thisCommoncraft video called Wikis in Plain English.
Google Sites - Google Sites makes creating and sharing a group website easy. Google Sites also allows you to limit who exactly can edit and participate with the wiki. Click HERE to watch a video about how to set up a Google Site.
PBWiki - PBwiki is the world's largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis. We host over 500,000 wikis, serve millions of users per month, and 96% of our business users would recommend PBwiki to a friend. Click HERE to watch a video about creating a wiki.
Wetpaint - A Wetpaint website is built on the power of collaborative thinking. Here, you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks. A social website that’s so easy to use, anyone can participate. For more information watch this Commoncraft video entitled Wetpaint Wikis in Plain English.
Wikispaces - Wikispaces is built to work anywhere, anytime. All you need is a web browser and an Internet connection. Members can create pages and spaces without undue restrictions or rules. Guests can edit pages without creating an account. Wikispaces gives groups the freedom to publish pages that are long-lived, regularly updated, and built by many contributors. Click HERE to take a tour of Wikispaces.
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