Kibisis

Kibisis is a complete Video to Flash Converter. Kibisis allows you to encode standard video and audio files into low bit rate Flash movies, ready to be streamed across today's Internet connections. Using Kibisis you can create a streaming Flash Video, that anyone can see without the need of any special program - plugin or codec (consider that 99% of the users are capable to see Flash in their web browsers).

Online Community Toolkit

Thinking about building or hosting an online community? Looking for specific tips, tools and ideas? Start here.

The site has many links to excellent articles on various topics around online communities, specifically targeted for facilitators. Links to courses about online facilitation; facilitation articles, tools and tips; case studies; communities of practice; and more.

eLearningBC

Learning management systems, course authoring products, virtual classroom products, off-the-shelf courseware, consulting & research services.

...an alliance of over 70 elearning providers working together to match your requirements with our highly-qualified member companies. From grade school to university curricula, virtual classrooms to virtual studios, content development tools to learning management systems... a wide and proven range of products and services. Our alliance structure allows us to combine solutions and provide you with a unique, tailored approach...

Grade-Eh

I can't help but chuckle at the title of the site, but hey, it's Canadian. Eh?

The goal of this site is to provide useful tools, information, and resources for webmasters and web developers. Grade-Eh is primarily intended for use by Canadian web developers, but is also useful for Americans, the British, Australians, and New Zealanders. Here you will find free online tools, free national flag clip art, and a directory of useful web sites for web developers. Part of my web site is a free Canadian clip art section. I offer a large number of free images for use in personal and commercial web pages. The clip art includes Canada's flag, maple leaf, and map.

Greg Robinson (Victoria, BC) has several Canadian resources in his Clip Art Section, including links to other Canadian sites, several about Canada's Flag, Canada Day, Canadian Products. Also link from his homepage to A Guide for Web Developers and Tools for Webmasters.

BCcampus Online Communities

There's a new K-12 online community sponsored and run by BC Campus: BC Learning Marketplace & Expo. I encourage you to visit, look around, become a member (it's free and easy), sign up for the email weekly activity updates. They have some excellent webcasts, discussion forums, and here's something fun -- there are online meeting rooms and virtual offices that you can use with your colleagues any time. Please check it out!

The non-typographer's guide to practical typeface selection

The author offers

"a practical approach... [that] primarily applies to web design."

A short article with some quick tips.

Images Canada

Images Canada: picturing Canadian culture. If you need some Canadian image content, check this site.

The images on the Images Canada website are contributed by a number of different partners. ...the partners give you permission to reproduce their images for non-commercial purposes as long as you abide by the terms and conditions of the pre-authorized license.

Getting a Reponse to Blogging Assignments

How DO we get a response from our students if/when we use blogs as a medium for both the assignments and peer commentary? This article is by a teacher asking this question. He got a good number of responses with some excellent ideas from other teachers.

Webpage Creation - HTML, XTML, DHTML, etc.

I'm currently taking a course about coding in XHTML. Over the next few weeks I'll be gathering reference/resource links from that course and adding them to my resource page, linked in the title above. If you too are in the process of transitioning to XHTML from HTML (or wish you know how.....or wish you knew why :), you might want to check back once a week and see what's new in that section of the above page.

TIP: I highly recommend LVS Online. Really inexpensive, short courses that are very, very informative, fun, helpful. A great range of topics too!

Regular Expressions -- for math teachers

Many people seem to be using RegEx as a way to create the variations for answers in math questions in their online courses. I've heard it's simple to learn and use, but I don't do math so I don't use RegEx. However, I have a couple of reference sites for you to check out, below.

• Regular expression checker
• Henk's regex checker (Henk is an online colleague of mine, and a real expert with regex)
  
• Regular Expression Basics: "Because there can be varying implementations, this article will cover basic principles that are commonly used."
• The Regex Coach: A free graphical application for Linux and Windows which can be used to experiment with (Perl-compatible) regular expressions interactively.
  
• Demo of RegEx for short-answer questions: Maybe you'll want to read this whole discussion thread, not just this message. Later in the thread, Henk (see item above) expands on this message's info.
  
• RegEx jumpstart for WebCT users: This thread will answer your questions and provide you with a jump start to using regular expressions in WebCT quizzes. Then here's another thread, and after that, yet another thread. :)
  

World of Education

"...a free site dedicated to providing quality educational resources to the general public in an easy to use format."

Category headings at the site: Jobs in Education, Library (extensive), World Facts (teaching resources and more), Web Directory, Forums (specifically directed at the education sector), Book Store (education sector).

Feed2JS

Create an RSS page from any webpage.

"Using RSS feeds in your webpages is just a cut-n-paste away!"

The people who run this FREE service created it because

"... it seemed like people could use an easier method for incorporating RSS into their own web sites."

Here's a link directly to the feed generating form.

Google Tutor.com

Even people who use Google every day have no idea of the extent of their features, or how to make the best use of them. This site is devoted to helping us learn the tricks to expand our Google experience. Mark Fleming just started this site this month, and it's already got some good goodies :). Like, check out his entry on how to use GMail as an extra 1 Gb drive on your own Windows machine. Groovy.

When I’ve told others of the vast features and formidable power of Google tools, they are quite frankly astonished. ....This is why I decided to create Googletutor.com. Not only will I be able to help readers to understand more about Google, but in the process I’ll learn more about it myself. Is that my only motive? Yes. I honestly just love Google! ... Within months, we’ll have a nice database of information from which you can draw. Keep reading, submit any tips you might have, and feel free to comment on each blog entry through the comments form.

Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design

Thomas Erickson of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center says:

I suggest that rather than trying to construct a unified, coherent account of interaction design, we would do better to take a more syncretic approach, gathering appropriate concepts and exploring their interplay without, however, insisting on resolving their tensions and contradictions. In this essay I explore these issues.

• I begin with a definition, and illustrate my approach to partitioning the terrain of interaction design using five conceptual "lenses."
• In so doing, I cover most of what I see as the theoretical roots of interaction design.
• I then turn to the role of theory in interaction design, and suggest that a good way to begin is to assemble a toolkit of concepts for interaction design that consists of appropriately sized theoretical constructs.

Center for Environmental Education Online (CEE)

You'll find K-12 environmental education curriula related to all subject areas on topics ranging from agriculture and climate change to social action and solar energy. Each curriculum in our library has been reviewed by an environmental studies graduate student according to the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) guidelines for excellence. You can search for curriulum by categories including grade level, subject, region of the country, and topic.

Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education

What are Common Factors and Best Practices of Institutions that have Been Successful at e-Learning? Published on February 1, 2005, this study contains the results of a study of 21 higher education institutions that have achieved success in Internet-supported learning. If you don't have time to read it all, at least read the Executive Summary, which closes with,

To successful institutions Internet-supported learning is an opportunity to reconsider the intersection of mission and student service and to create an improved educational product. It is not about technology adoption. The successful institutions are addressing strategic, cultural and process issues that will help them perform their mission more effectively in the future no matter what direction technology takes.

Electronic Portfolios and Dimensions of Learning

A short article that attempts to

"...show a direct link between electronic portfolios and the dimensions of learning."

FeedSpring

It's hard to find a free and easy application to create RSS feeds out of your website materials. Feedspring is a new (beta at this time) FREE software for creating RSS feeds. Click my title above for a direct link; here's another link to an article about Feedspring.

Packaging & Publishing Learning Objects

Or a direct link to the pdf file.

This new guide from Becta gives the grand tour through most of the relevant learning object related standards, and contains a few useful starting points, for instance the "Packaging and publishing checklist."

Interactive HUMAN BODY

This was fun and, oh, I also learned a lot too. Great use of technology for learning.

Developing Self Directed Learners

According to the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's most recent regional needs assessment "helping students become self-directed learners who take responsibility for their own academic performance" was ranked near the top of identified priorities...This Topical Summary looks at current research on several aspects of developing self-directed learners:

• Defining who is a self-directed learner
• Teaching or helping students to become self-directed learners
• Creating school environments that nurture self-directed learning within
  standards-based accountability systems
• How implementing state-level policies can assist schools in their efforts to become centers of high achievement and incubators for self-directed learners

Learning Tools

From UBC Arts ISIT:

The e-learning tools listed here are publicly available for academic use, within and outside the University of British Columbia. Periodically, Arts IS releases new tools to this site, so please check back in the future to see what's new. You are invited to explore these exciting new learning tools, and make free use of the learning objects they generate for educational or research purposes.

TOOLS at this time include:

• Timeline Tool
• Discussion Extractor for WebCT discussions
• WYSIWYG Tool
• Multimedial Learning Object Authoring Tool
• Character Stroke Recorder
• Vocabularly Memorization Platform.

WebCT Discussion Extractor Tool

Saving and Exporting WebCT Discussions as Learning Objects

Discussion boards (including WebCT discussion boards) can facilitate rich online student discussions and interactions, and are arguably some of the most effective mediators of online learning out there.…But what happens to these dynamic student-centered interactions, these “mini- knowledgebases” of student learning, once the course is over?

View this recording to learn how this tool addresses the problem of re-usability of student interactions in WebCT Discussions, and how it allows an instructor or a student to export a fully threaded discussion object from WebCT for re-use in a wide variety of contexts.

>>The webcast has been recorded and is available for viewing Here.
>>The link for using the tool is at the UBC Learning Tools site.

Rubistar for Creating Rubrics

RubiStar is a free tool to help a teacher...who wants to use rubrics but does not have the time to develop them from scratch. Read more ... Go to the tutorial (it includes information on changing categories, their headings and content).

Files to help you with Flash

(click title for link)
A bunch of links to Flash helper applications, complete with an indicator of their prices.

Ready for a Virtual Course Management System?

(click title for link)
Directed at the K-12 world. Before you or your institution dives into virtual learning management, this article supplies some questions to explore.

Course management systems, however, require a big investment of time, money, and support; they are not necessarily right for every district. Here is some initial guidance.

Questions include, "Are your teachers committed?", "How can a CMS help instruction?", "Is it easy to use?", "Do you have technical capabilities?"... and more.

How can Children Stay Safe Using Blogs?

(click title for link) An article with guidelines, posted by the Australian government.

Is Blogging Good For The Brain?

(click title for link)

So most of us bloggers just know that the answer to the above is yes. Especially if most of what we're doing is blogging in the strictist sense, not journaling, not just linking, but really synthesizing and analyzing what we read. Now we've got some real live neuro specialists doctor types who say so as well

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Elements of Effective e-Learning Design:

(click title for link)

This paper highlights the elements of effective design that we consider assist in the development of high quality materials in a cost efficient way. We introduce six elements of design and discuss each in some detail. These elements focus on paying attention to the provision of a rich learning activity, situating this activity within an interesting story line, providing meaningful opportunities for student reflection and third party criticism, considering appropriate technologies for delivery, ensuring that the design is suitable for the context in which it will be used, and bearing in mind the personal, social, and environmental impact of the designed activities. Along the way, we describe how these design elements can be effectively utilized by contextualizing them with examples from an e-learning initiative.

Math Resource Links

(click title for link)

This page is one of the many resources at wwwtools for education. You'll need to enter your email address to see the article. It's full of excellent suggestions for resource sites.

wwwtools For Education

(click title for link)

...designed to keep you informed and to save valuable time in tracking down information and resources on the World Wide Web. Each article is on a particular topic or issue related to Web-based teaching and learning. The articles take a skilled researcher between 10 and 20 hours to research and prepare. Whenever a new article is added to the database you will be informed by email. You can opt-out of the email list at any time. Articles remain on this data base - however only paid or sponsored subscribers can view archived articles older than 3 months.

Exploratorium

This site is truly Fantastic to explore! Take some time and have some fun.