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Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.

Most LMSes isolate students in their particular courses. And once that class is over and once a student has graduated, the information contained there - notes, lessons, assignments, discussions - are lost. Schoology blends a social networking interface with learning management tools, so that teachers and students (and parents and administrators) can communicate and collaborate on academic issues.

The recent growth of ebooks and tablet computers, like the iPad, is fuelling the drive towards digital education. For the first time, institutions are thinking of innovative ways to incorporate digital content into learning programs. The potential to reach a global audience is also significant. And online learning need not be static or impersonal: on the contrary, it offers unparalleled opportunities for interactivity and open communication among students and teachers

Another attractive feature of online learning is that it is much more accessible than traditional tuition. Since resources can be spread instantly and for free to anyone in the world, learning is immediate, affordable and rewarding. It does not attract the hidden costs of contact based learning, like transport, material and stationery costs, which makes it valuable for less-privileged students. It also allows working people to gain valuable education in the time available to them, so that they can increase their skills and improve their working lives.

Many universities are now posting video lectures, reading materials and other resources for free online. The range of materials covers everything from introductory videos and podcasts to advanced textbooks and detailed research -- a true multimedia experience.

If I have to explain Edmodo in one short phrase, it would be: “Facebook for Education”

It’s eerily similar to Facebook – with some modifications here and there to make it fit for educational purposes.

The major difference, then, is the database. SafeAssign's library will include a scan of the Internet and weekly updates of the ProQuest ABI/Inform database of 2.6 million articles, as well as student and faculty submissions made Blackboard's network of users.

Barrie said Turnitin has a far larger advantage of scale: the Turnitin database includes 40 million student papers from 9,000 academic institutions in 90 countries.

SafeAssign asks students for permission to store their papers each time they submit one via Blackboard, which may mean that the catalog grows more slowly than Turnitin's average of 100,000 new papers each day.

enhance their learning experience with the use of some simple and low-cost digital tools.

She says tutors began to create a more effective, time-saving combination of text and audio. "They found they could write quick little annotations on students' essays and then elaborate more in the audio feedback."

The research also revealed that students appeared more willing to listen to feedback via audio than to commit time to reading written comments.

General Use foursquare’s unique social networking strategy for linking up lessons, city guides and students from different classes.

Higher Education Campuses like Harvard are embracing foursquare as a strong community and recruitment tool; read below for ways to use it in your school.

Using Bboogle, course instructors provide links within their CMS course sites to content they create in the @u environment. Google Docs - Share documents including spreadsheets, presentation slides, Google forms, and other file types, with students. Google Calendars - Share information including assignment due dates, test dates, class syllabus, and project deadlines on a class calendar that automatically appears in the individual electronic calendars of every student in a class. Google Sites - Share a course site that brings together all classroom materials including docs, calendars, photos, videos, attachments, and message blogs that can be presented to students either for viewing or co-authoring.

Organizing in Evernote

Access Information Anywhere, No Thumb Drive Necessary As a student, you’re all over the place: in class on your mobile device, at the gym, in your dorm room, at the library, etc. With Evernote, files, notes and documents are available to you everywhere – on your phone, your desktop, and anywhere you have an internet connection. That means that if you’re working in a computer lab, all your research is there. If you lost your thumb drive before your presentation, you can pull up your PowerPoint from a friend’s laptop. Having everywhere access to your Evernote account also means you can make great use of the in-between time we all tend to have. Whether you’re waiting for the bus, or for class to start, you can make quick edits to anything you’re working on. Evernote puts everything in one place, and makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, no matter where you are. If you’re doing research, alone or in a group, Evernote saves time and helps keep you organized.

The real treasure trove was to be found in the students' innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their courses—Nobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure.

CIT used to have an e-Portfolio service that did not have a high take up rate. There are several reasons for this that I can think of: It was provided under the build it and they will come model. I believe not enough was done to convince students and teaching staff about the benefits of building e-Portfolios. Consequently, no one was willing to integrate this into their course, as part of reflective learning. Keeping an e-Portfolio was seen as extra work, which neither students nor staff were keen on. Perhaps the software itself was not very conducive to building e-Portfolios. One key area with users seem to be that the e-Portfolio should have a customisable design and layout (at least on its public face). Our system was not flexible in that aspect. In fact, in the latter years, the option to publish the e-Portfolio was taken away entirely. The e-Portfolio service was a walled garden. It wasn’t easy to bring in digital artefacts, which may have resided on other public services, nor was it easy to repurpose that information into useful formats – personal reference, actual resume, showcase of work. No one figured how students would access the e-Portfolios after they graduated as it was all based on our single sign-on system.

Thanks to search engines, most simple facts don’t need to be remembered. They can be accessed with a few keystrokes, plucked from ubiquitous server-stored external memory — and that may be changing how our own memories are maintained. A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.

One small but intriguing effect in the new study involved students who were less able to identify subtly manipulated facts, such as a changed name or date, when drawing on memories they thought were saved online.