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Not an article that is dismissive of classrooms but one that ponders what works in a classroom and where classroom teaching fits in the larger spectrum.

Quite a lot of relevance to the "You can't do that in a classroom" link posted recently.

I found this a while ago. It's interesting but I don't actually think it's that good a report, it doesn't compare things consistently. It does have a nice section on guidelines for running a session in a virtual classroom. We should probably write our own ESD 'virtual classroom' review and this report would provide a good starting point for putting together some criteria to review against.

A review of 'virtual classroom' software done by a company called Kineo.

Oh, just thought, we could probably use Jane Hart's tool list to put together the list of tools to review.

"Twitter Notes to PowerPoint from The Tablet PC Education Blog by noreply@blogger.com (The Tablet PC In Education Blog) NESI teachers find Dave Johnson's suggested ways to use Twitter improves classroom PowerPoint presentations. They use: 1. The add-on PowerPoint Feedback Slides to insert student feedback clouds with a presentation. They configure it, so they can moderate feeds before they post. 2. The real-time PowerPoint Twitter Ticker Bar at the bottom of the slide to display the last 10 tweets that match the PP slide. 3. The PowerPoint Twitter Voting function to student responses to teacher Qs on a PowerPoint slide. Twitter tallies the results and displays them as a bar or pie chart. 4. The PowerPoint Auto Tweet to push PowerPoint notes out to students via Twitter in real time, as teachers flip to each side. Teachers control what goes out by wrapping tweeted notes in twitter tags. Thanks, Dave, for pointing us to these Twitter functions. Kudos, Teachers for adapting them to classrooms. Johnson, D. Display Tweets in PowerPoint, Send PowerPoint Notes to Twitter. Heiny, R. Accelerated K12 Mobile Learning: Press Release (NESI). Posted by The Tablet PC In Education Blog. February 13, 2009, 3:29 PM. (Retrieved January 15, 2009, 3:19 PM.)"

This is a great post and it's great that it comes from an academic. In our sessions we do often get bogged down in the "but it's never as good as face to face" debates. I think it's partially because some people can only see e-learning as being all or nothing i.e. your course is online or it's not rather than considering areas of their teaching that might benefit from a bit of e.

ProfHacker column on useful plug-ins for WordPress when using it in the classroom.

"The first course management system built on a social networking platform". Sounds interesting but it seems to be impossible to find out what the features of the product are..."Our design team has fleshed out the core components of course management to arm teachers with only the essential tools they need to simplify the online experience" no description of what those core components are!