Want a video projector for short distances? The Pico Projector, reviewed by David Pogue, might be worth getting for small classes. Cables come with it that allow you to hook up a variety of devices, including an iPod (both video iPods and the iPod Touch). But you’ll need a speaker because the speaker in the projector is pretty small.

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The folks at Inspiration, the popular software that allows you to create concept maps, have created My Webspiration, which is presently in beta. I’m very impressed. Not only can you create your own concept maps but you can also collaborate with others. Additionally, you can both import and export Inspiration 8 documents.

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If you you would like to create Web pages easily, download the free software, exe. You can download it from exelearning.org I have been using it extensively to for creating Web pages that have screencasts for the Anatomy and Physiology class that I am teaching as a hybrid course. Here’s a video describing exe:

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If you are an teacher and you would like to use a WordPress blogging site as a site for a course, you can install the Scholarpress plug-in available at ScholarPress Courseware.
Here is the description of what is available with their plug-in:

“As of version 1.0, ScholarPress Courseware gives you the ability to create entries in a schedule in the Schedule page, add items of various media to a bibliography in the Bibliography page, and assign those bibliography items to read (or create other types of assignments) in the Assignments page, and edit your course information in the Course Info page.”

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A nice software title that allows you to create tutorials by screencapturing portions of your computer monitor is the software ScreenSteps. With ScreenSteps, you can insert various images of various portions of what is on your screen and insert things like arrows, boxes, and circles. With the Pro version of the software, you can export the tutorial as a PDF or HTML page. Check out the videos on the Web site to learn about some of the other nice features.

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For those of you who are like Google Apps, there is a new Missing Manual. You can learn more about it by going to Google Apps: The Missing Manual. You can also download (as a PDF) the Table of Contents and the Introduction.

If you are not already familiar with Google Apps, you can go to the introductory page to learn more about them. One of the really nice apps is Google Docs since it allows a group of individuals to collaborate on a paper.

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Probably many of you are familiar with the various Google Apps but may not be familiar with the relatively new Microsoft Live Workspace.

If you need to collaborate with anyone or if your students need to collaborate, these are tools intended for that purpose although, of course, you can use them for your own personal work.

Since Microsoft Live Workspace is a “competitor” to Google Apps, I was interested in the review found at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/office_live_workspace_vs_google_docs_feature_by_feature.php that compares these two.

If you read the comments posted in response to this article, you’ll notice the one particular comment that points out that the article failed to discuss some of the features of Google Apps not found in Microsoft Live Workspace.

So that you don’t have to figure out which comment I am referring to, here it is:

Google Docs is far better than Office Live, especially thanks to its real-time collaboration and mobile access. There are some any other features of Google Docs that should have been presented, such as the chat feature in spreadsheets and presentations or the integration of Google Docs with other apps (you can schedule an event in Google Calendar from a doc, you can integrate a doc in the brand new Google Sites wiki-like application, you can transform a Google Notebook into a doc, you can use a Google Spreadsheet as a web-based bookmark storage thanks to its integration with Google Co-op subscribed links, you can also published in Blogger directly from a doc, you can use a Google Doc spreadsheet template to upload a complex Google Earth map - see Google Earth Outreach, you can access from Gmail a Google shared spreadsheet even if it has been sent as attached email, etc.).

You missed so many advantages of a very web-based workspace, and you seem to ignore that Google is preparing to launch a Google-Gears enable version of their suite that will let you access and EDIT shared docs OFFLINE directly from your Internet Browser. This has been officially announced and is currently tested by Google teams.

MS Office Live is a “workaround” to retain users. To keep Office is to play against the “in the cloud” computing trend, which is the future of collaboration. If you like a continually improved editor, don’t wait years for the next Office version: Google release amazing features every week!

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Carnegie Mellon’s Enhancing Education Web site is very well structured and contains separate Web pages for these topics:

• Learning/Teaching Principles
• Design and Teach a Course
• Solve a Teaching Problem
• Use Educational Technology
• Try Something New
• Research Projects
• Other Resources

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At the 2007 Educause conference, Diane Zorn described an online course in philosophy that she created.

Here are the main points that I got out of this podcast:

“The goal of distance education, in my experience, is not to replicate the in-class experience but rather to go beyond what is possible in a conventional classroom.”

She used Mediasite which provides a video of the instructor along with the corresponding Powerpoint files but with a little ingenuity, something similar to this could be done using Keynote, Garageband, and iMovie.

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This is an interesting podcast - http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/e07podcasttomorrowsstuden/45344

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