IT Master\’s Program

http://www.campussqueeze.com/post/Top-10-Web-Tools-for-College-Students.aspx

This website discloses the most ingenious 10 web tools that may help collage students to pursue success in their study. Students will use many different Web tools that save time, help learn more and most importantly did not cost a penny.  In this web site students can find a tool that calculates their GPA in a very easy way, help to solve math problem, online dictionary and more. In addition, students who struggle for money can end-spending thousands of dollars on books with Book Finder, which is a neat tool that allows students to compare prices on more than 125 million books for sale from 4,000 sellers. So there’s no need to go to Amazon, Half.com and all the other book sites when Book Finder can search them for you.

Del.icio.us http://delicious.com/ is a free social bookmarking service,a special software for identifying,organizing,sorting,finding,classifying and at the same time sharing web recourses. Users can create as many accounts as they wish,create their own collection of website resources, tags them and make their resources public or private.Since del.icio.us doesn’t restrict the number of accounts that can be created, not only individual students can have accounts, but accounts can be created for workgroups or entire classes with each student in the group having the password to the account so he or she can add bookmarks. It is an excellent tool for archiving information, following new resources from certain fields. In addition,new information is always added, revised and filtered. Sites can be saved and accessed on any computer with an internet connection. For all the above reasons Del.icio.us is a very useful tool for every classroom. For more information about Del.icio.us visit the following website.
http://tinyurl.com/2v2bmr

Wordle is a text generated program that allows you to type in text and it will make a web or word cloud for your particular subject or idea. Uses for wordle include capturing keypoints, revision terms,poetry words,introducing new vocabulary,general display purposes,spelling lists, reflection and more. Check out the following website for 46 interesting ways  to use wordle in the classroom.  http://www.ideastoinspire.co.uk/wordle.htm

Glogster. EDU http://edu.glogster.com is a free online poster that can have texts,videos,audios,images,graphics and hyperlinks. It is a perfect Web 2.0 tool for displaying and portraying information on a particular topic. It is a secure,private,safe platform that can be monitored directly by teachers. Teachers can create classes and sign up to 100 students, send students massages and give them feedback. Glogster can be used  as a presentation tool to present new ideas or to review curriculum materials. Also, it can be used as a self- introduction tool at the beginning of school year and Eportfolio for students’ projects during and at the end of the semester. Glogster can be embedded  into class wiki,blog and website and it can be posted within different social networks to share it with other people. The following is a tutorial video for Glogster http://tinyurl.com/2wonlm6

We’ve all seen You Tube but have you seen Teacher Tube? Teacher Tube works just like You Tube but focuses on teaching concepts and offers a free membership. The goal of TeacherTube is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. They seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. 
TeacherTube is a site where teachers can post educational resources such as video, audio, documents, photos, groups and blogs. The site contains a mixture of classroom teaching resources and others designed to aid teacher training.

TeacherTube was the idea of Jason Smith, he has been a teacher, coach, campus administrator and district administrator in public schools. He asked the question, “Why can’t teachers, students, and schools utilize the power of the read/write web for learning?” To overcome barriers, he decided to just create a site and get started trying to help.

TeacherTube is a community of educators for education; the content of this software monitored by community members and TeacherTube’s staff. At any time a TeacherTube community member can flag any content, then the staff will determine whether the content is appropriate or not. The stuff determines the appropriateness of TeacherTube’s content through two simple questions.

1). Does the content promote professional growth for educators? And

2). Can the content be used for instructional purposes with students? If the content does not meet these standards, the staff removes it immediately.

In order to be a member of TeacherTube, go to TeacherTube.com. Click the “Free Sign Up!” link in the top right corner of Home Page. Sign up takes less than a minute to complete. You will be sent a confirmation email and your done. To upload a new video simply log in. Click the “Upload” link in the top right hand corner under the Search Bar, and then follow the simple 2-step process to upload your video.

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets  posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page.Users may subscribe to other author tweets, this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications( such as, for smartphones), or by SMS available in certain countries.Twitter can be used for different educational uses like searching for tweets about particular topics,extend class discussion, post and share links of useful resources and post and answer questions to increase students’ interaction. Twitter has another useful feature that can be used in the classroom called the backchannel. It is a way of creating dialogue within the class while the instructor is up there speaking.  It is a place for questions about what is being discussed, links that people are sharing, and general comments about what the instructor is saying. The following video has more details about the backchannel benefits

http://tinyurl.com/387zvo7

For more detailed information about Twitter educational uses visit this website http://tinyurl.com/mp3d7n

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/has-google-developed-the-next-wave-of-online-education/, this article discloses some questions that asked to the programmers of Google Wave, a free web tool that combines text, audio, and video chat with features like drag and drop documents.  Programmers introduces Google Wave and disclosed their assumption about the email format if it were invited today that format would merge social networking with multimedia in an online meeting space where students and instructors can see each other type in real time, conduct private conversations, and edit documents simultaneously. Where as Google Wave have advantages that lets users see the development of an online conversation between students working on a group project. The screen starts out blank and incrementally fills with user activity.

They stated that Wave’s spell checker doesn’t match words against their dictionary spelling, but rather accounts for the word’s context using a complex language model spawned from billions of web pages. Even if a word is spelled correctly, Wave will underline the word in red if it is used incorrectly or out of context.

Google Wave marks the next step in collaboration capabilities that began with eMail and evolved with programs such as Google Docs, which gives users access to the same document so they can edit a project without eMailing it back and forth.

Schools and universities endeavor to unified communications by using voice, video, and data services with software applications designed to achieve greater collaboration among individuals or groups and improve business processes. By unifying communications universities will keep connection and save money. The considerable benefits of implementing unified communications among universities are to increase productivity, more reliable communication and introduce good service to schools and other sectors. Schools generated the idea of unifying communication due to the current recessionary economy. For more information visit the following website.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/colleges-turn-to-unified-communications-to-save-costs-boost-productivity/

The federal government emphasizes the significance to implement eReaders, a reading technology device, in schools and colleges to provide disable students with appropriate educational technologies. Whereas most schools strive to use devices that are accessible to the blind students, many eReaders have a text-to-speech function that reads words aloud, but the devices lack menus that people who are blind or have low vision can navigate, the iPad is considerably closer to an eReading solution that will be effective for blind students than other products are out there.

eReader will help to equate the opportunity of using technology to both health students and disable students.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/06/30/feds-make-ereaders-accessible-to-all-students/

In many cases teachers are welling and have the desire to integrate technology within their classrooms however, the limitation that can be found in their schools prevent them from accomplishing this desire. Those limitations include the lack of technology supplies that make integrating technology almost difficult. However, through writing effective grants teachers can still be able to integrate technology within their classrooms without worrying of school limitations. There are some very useful tips that can make writing grants much easier and more convincible. For example, start with your project outcome to focus your writing on those outcomes. Also, support your project with successful cases and research studies as well as notable quotes to convince the grant providers. Make your grant proposal more appealing and well-organized because your presentation plays an important part in accepting your ideas. Another good tip for an effective grant proposal is being honest while writing the grant proposal and what you want accomplish. For more useful and effective grant proposal tips visit the following resource.
http://712educators.about.com/cs/grantwriting/a/grantwriting_2.html