(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”).
A popular reason for exploring gamification in online learning is because we want to increase student engagement with the content. Games are nothing if not engaging, and the very best games can give educators deep insights...
The recent explosion of great tools that simply run in a web browser has been amazing. From tools like Google Docs, Evernote, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Prezi, and Rememberthemilk and the venerable Gmail– you can access powerful tools for free where...
What began as a pie‐in‐the‐sky idea was actually put into production as Google Body Browser, a 3D WebGL powered app that showed the major features of the anatomy in a browser. As Google has focused their energy around their core products they have discontinued Body Browser and open sou...
Image by Tiago Daniel via Flickr
“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!” ‑Thomas Alva Edison
“I discovered the meaning of life but I forgot to write it down.” ‑Hugh Gallagher
You know those times when you are struck with a brilliant, life‐altering, million‐dollar, save‐the‐worl...
Image by Sue Waters via Flickr
As you may have gathered from my defense of desktop email clients, I prefer desktop apps to webapps any day of the week. Even if the app is powered by a web data service (like Gmail), desktop applications can take advantage of the massive computing power...
Image by adria.richards via Flickr
As the blogosphere debates the death of the desktop email client, I am anxiously awaiting the stable release of Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0. Like devotees of Apple Mail.app or Microsoft Outlook, I have come to depend on the desktop app for speed, stabil...
Image via Wikipedia
Flickr.com, Yahoo.com, and Google (and now Bing.com) can be great places to find images of just about anything under the sun. Unfortunately, many of the images you find are the intellectual property of someone else– so you can’t include them with having to worry abo...
There’s no denying that the iPhone has become an amazing tool for taking your internet connected life mobile. However, many of its functions are available to even the lowest tech “dumb phones” on the market. This post will show you how you can use your dumb old RAZR phone to blog, tweet, podcast,...
Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user‐created Add‐Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add‐ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add‐ons you pile on...
Image by eyesplash Mikul via Flickr
I have been interested in using blogging software to create online learning communities for a while now. This last year, I had students start Blogger.com, Tumblr.com, and Posterous.com blogs, then subscribed to all of their blog feeds with my Go...