Podcasting comes to Oncourse, Skype Video, Packetville

Podcasting comes to Oncourse

Here at Indiana University, we use Oncourse CL as our learning management system. It is part of the Sakai Project, and other institutions have the same system under a different name. It is similar to Blackboard and WebCT, which are popular commercial systems. The Oncourse Developers have now added a podcast tool to the system. It can be turned on by going to Site Setup link on the lefthand navigation bar, choosing Edit Tools and selecting Podcasts. Then it will appear in the lefthand navigation bar, visible to the students. You can upload an mp3 file, and Oncourse will host it. Then, you fill out a few form fields which creates the RSS file, which is also hosted on Oncourse. Finally, it provides you with the URL to enter into iTunes or whatever podcatcher or ipod directory you want, which allows people to subscribe to it. Or the students can download it immediately from Oncourse. I'm giving my W505 students the option to create podcasts this semester; I hope at least a few of them take me up on it.

Skype now does PC-Mac Video

For the longest time, the only way to do free videoconferencing between the PC and the Mac was to use AOL Instant Messenger, which interfaced with iChat. But now Skype is offering a new version of its Mac client with videoconferencing capabilities--it worke with the iSight cam from Apple.

Packetville

I haven't had a lot of time to explore this K-12 resource yet, but it looks pretty impressive. I played a game about packets which got across the idea of how information travels over the internet pretty well. Worth checking out!
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/edu/packetville/index.html

That's all for now,
Chris