Before lunch, I spent some time in the vendor area, spending the most time at the Moodlerooms, Google, and Blackboard .
At the Moodlerooms booth, I talked with them about their hosting service and then stuck around for a presentation about Joule. Joule is a tool that they built to extend some key functions of Moodle that are in high demand by their customers. The main features that I caught were an alerts function that could monitor Moodle activity and send automated alerts if students are falling behind on assignments, a tool that monitors course activity (content hits, etc...) and does some item analysis, and a tool that allows you to search and add materials from content repositories. So this is something to consider if those types of activities show up in a gap analysis.
I went over to the Google booth (staffed by young and informally dressed staff) to talk with them about Google Apps and Google Wave. The Apps discussion wasn't anything new - mostly what is included in Apps for Education. Regarding Google Wave, I told them that we had a group of people looking at it and we had some issues when trying to do something like simultaneously edit the same document. We talked about using two Waves, connected waves, wavelets, widget pallets, etc... They're putting together a research session this evening to discuss how Wave can be used in education, so I'll go to that.
Finally, I went over to Blackboard and saw what they did with Stanford's iPhone app (built on Blackboard mobile). It was really slick - location aware maps, athletics, course search and registration, sports scores, news, campus photos and movies, and a campus calendar. They're working on an integration with Blackboard Learn now (the course management product). I'd like to see a mobile application like that at Penn State.
At the Moodlerooms booth, I talked with them about their hosting service and then stuck around for a presentation about Joule. Joule is a tool that they built to extend some key functions of Moodle that are in high demand by their customers. The main features that I caught were an alerts function that could monitor Moodle activity and send automated alerts if students are falling behind on assignments, a tool that monitors course activity (content hits, etc...) and does some item analysis, and a tool that allows you to search and add materials from content repositories. So this is something to consider if those types of activities show up in a gap analysis.
I went over to the Google booth (staffed by young and informally dressed staff) to talk with them about Google Apps and Google Wave. The Apps discussion wasn't anything new - mostly what is included in Apps for Education. Regarding Google Wave, I told them that we had a group of people looking at it and we had some issues when trying to do something like simultaneously edit the same document. We talked about using two Waves, connected waves, wavelets, widget pallets, etc... They're putting together a research session this evening to discuss how Wave can be used in education, so I'll go to that.
Finally, I went over to Blackboard and saw what they did with Stanford's iPhone app (built on Blackboard mobile). It was really slick - location aware maps, athletics, course search and registration, sports scores, news, campus photos and movies, and a campus calendar. They're working on an integration with Blackboard Learn now (the course management product). I'd like to see a mobile application like that at Penn State.