Guest Post by Aris Samad – Co founder and CEO, QuickSchools.com.

Mr. Samad’s post provides a nice introduction to his company’s easy-to-get-started with tool that provides some course management functionality and some student information system functionality. If you like what you read, and you’re in the market for an easy, hosted tool like this, click on over to QuickSchools.com and give it a try. And don’t forget the special offer at the end of the post. – KW

There’s a big difference between implementing a school management system for a school with 300 students vs implementing such a system for a large school or district.

Administrators & teachers of smaller schools don’t want a consultant coming on-site to get requirements, and then spending months deploying the system and training the users. They just want a system that works with their needs in mind. And they want it to work from Day 1 – to be as simple as setting up a Gmail account.

That’s why I was a bit surprised by BlackBaud’s FastStart program for smaller schools. They guarantee that you’ll be up & running in 45 days, which seems rather long. Their implementation plan looks a bit scary to me, to be honest. Thinking about it, however, it makes sense when you consider that those systems were designed for large schools & districts in mind, and they’re trying to take that product and make it work for smaller schools.

Over here at QuickSchools, we wanted to challenge this approach. We asked ourselves: Would it be possible to create a school management system, specifically for smaller schools, that a school could sign up for, and within minutes, do the following:

• Add students & subjects
• Take attendance
• Enter gradebook data
• Print a report card with attendance & gradebook data instantly integrated right in
• Print a transcript

We wanted to do this so we could demonstrate to schools that using a school management system could be effortless.

Here’s how our flow looks:

Instant Sign Up
You go to www.quickschools.com, and sign up for an account. You are able to instantly log-in. A shiny new school management system has arrived at your doorstep! (or should I say, browser window).

Take Attendance
You click on Test Drive attendance (we added some students so you don’t have to), and take attendance.

Enter Gradebook Data
You click on Test Drive gradebook (again, we added a couple of subjects so you don’t have to). Enter in grades. See the final grade calculated instantly.

Print A Report Card
Go to report cards, click on a student, and voila! It’s ready to be printed, or you can override any of the grades. There are dozens of customizable report card templates to choose from, or we can create one for you from scratch for a tiny fee (free for now).

Print Transcripts
Like report cards, transcripts instantly pick up relevant data from the system, and you can effortlessly add historical grades & transfer credit.

I’m sure you’ll agree that smaller schools don’t need the administrative complexity of larger schools & districts. Pick a school management system that fits.

SPECIAL OFFER: Readers of this blog can get 50% off their first 2 months subscription (after the 30 day free trial of course!). Just use this coupon code: 649943. Offer expires October 2011.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
EctoLearning is a Solid Contender for Best Free Online CMS
Moodle 2.0 versus Blackboard 9.1 – a Brief Comparison
K12.com is America’s Largest Provider of Online Education for Grades K to 12

Have you used the services of this growing international partnership-based online provider?

I sat down last night to think about what my Wednesday post was going to be about. As soon as I sat down, a commercial came on TV for K12.com, a provider of ”online public school” for grades K to 12. It wasn’t immediately clear what facts support the “largest” claim, but they certainly appear to be doing this on a national and international scale. I just had to check them out further.

Their home page says that they provide “individualized learning customized to each child’s needs”, using an award-winning curriculum that engages students with a rich combination of online interactive and offline hands-on learning. I clicked on Find a School and then on my state, NY, and learned that they don’t have offerings here yet (my understanding is that we’re one a small number of remaining states that don’t permit online education at the K-12 level yet, but they didn’t mention that). They are partnered with 28 states and 38 countries. This page explains the different types of partnerships they have - public, private, and “blended” learning formats. Their course offerings are grouped into K – 8, High School, and Summer School, and they also offer Supplemental Education.

I was quickly impresssed with the breadth and inclusiveness of the offerings, with their passion, and with the richness of their web site. Don’t just take my word for it, click on over to K12.com and learn some more if this interests you like it did me! They also have a subsite designed specifically for educational administrators.

If you’re already aware of these folks and have anything you can share with us about your impression or your experiences with them, we’d love to hear more about it (click here to comment)!

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
The Changing Dynamic of Online Education
A Dozen Great Free Online Video Lecture Sites
15 Online Math Help and Tutoring Resources

Salman Khan is an inspiring education technology leader on a mission.

If your interested in “ed tech”, you’ve probably already heard of him. I first wrote about Salman Khan work in this post in March of last year, and he has continued to experience growing success since, including a major nod from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Sal Khan is a pioneer in the education technology field and he is changing people’s thinking about some aspects of education. 

The Khan Academy

Khan’s rise to the spotlight revolves around his wonderful work establishing and evolving the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy provides over 2000 video lectures on a wide array of academic topics, at pretty much all learning levels, and it’s self-paced offerings are being viewed by a million viewers a month!

In the TED Talk below, Khan does an entertaining job of explaining the genesis of his work, the many advantages of this format, and the impact it’s had on so many people. This is an inspiring video. I don’t find the time to watch many of these, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this one.

“I started getting letters from teachers … saying we’ve used your videos to flip the classroom. You’ve given the lectures, so what we do now is … assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework I now have the students doing in the classroom”.

As Khan notes, this application of technology is actually humanizing the classroom.

Students can consume the lecture materials on their own time, in a more comfortable environment, with a flexible format that allows for easy replays (a nice improvement over being embarrassed to ask to revisit a topic in class when students struggle to keep up). Then, when students do homework in class with the teacher available and peers assisting each other, there much less likely to end up “stuck” on a problem that they’re having trouble with – the help is right there. There are so many reasons why flipping the conventional model on it’s head can work so well. (This is increasingly becoming a key element in my own personal thinking about how to best leverage education technology).

The model Khan demonstrates from the Los Altos school district’s project trialing the use of Khan Academy lectures in their math curriculum is fascinating (this can be found around 12 minutes in on the video). Kids are learning the materials, in their properly sized, well organized video modules, at their own pace. Teachers can review progress in a straightforward format using an onscreen visual grid, and then focus on helping those who need help, specficially where they need it most. This is elegant in it’s simplicity and effectiveness. Teachers can spend less time delivering the lecture materials and more time precision-focused on each student’s comprehension of the material.

We are so fortunate to have people like Salman Khan putting themselves out there like this. Khan cast aside a traditional, highly lucratrive career and started changing young people’s lives with his non-profit effort to change education, inspiring so many of us along the way. 

While recognizing and celebrating this innovative work, we also wish the very best of luck to Sal Khan and the Khan Academy(click here if you’d like to consider contributing to the Khan Academy - even with the Gates’ backing, they can still use donations to keep this effort on the right track).

 Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Great Ed Tech Story: K-5 Summer Tech camp changes lives for low SES students
A Dozen Great Free Online Video Lecture Sites
The Khan Academy (offering 1100+ free tutorial videos)

EctoLearning offers useful course management functionality for free (and it’s all free, no limitations).

Last week I decided the next step in searching for the best free online Course Management Systems was to take a closer look EctoLearning and Edu20.org. I’d already checked out Rcampus, MyiCourse, and SchoolRack, and while I found them each to be useful, I didn’t really find what I was looking for. I’m hoping that one of these two others applications will be a tool I can gladly recommend.

EctoLearning

The basic idea behind creating a course page and content in EctoLearning is to create a group that represents the course, which automatically provides a nicely structured web page for the course. You can then create blog posts, assignments, forums, and content that you link to this group page. It’s a simple, effectively structured approach.

I’d been hoping to find a site where I could post assignments structured in the form of web pages where I would put links to articles and embedded videos as course materials. I also wanted a discussion forum where students could demonstrate comprehension of assigned work via informed discussion of the readings and assignments, and interact with and learn from other workshop participants. EctoLearning let me to do all of this, and the other tools I used did not, so clearly EctoLearning gets high marks in my book!

The structural elements of the EctoLearning platform

• Blog: Here you create blog posts, which students can respond to. Since this area displays at the top of the group page, I added a Welcome post here, and added a second post that provides some information about what to expect upon completion of the workshop. Since the posts sort in reverse chronological order, and I wanted to create a top-down ordered set of “instructional” blog posts regarding the structure of the course, I published my posts in reverse order. The same held for Forum topics.
• Q&A: In this area, students can ask questions and you can respond to them. You have the option of removing this section from the course group site page if you wish.
• Assignments: Here you can create assignments with brief descriptions, and you can provide availability dates and completion dates. You can also associate content with assignments. I didn’t really need this functionality for the way I was designing my workshop (I am delivering my assignments via content and forums), but this will be important to many instructors. Refer to EctoLearning’s Help Page for more on this topic (scroll down towards the bottom for help on assignments and grades. I do have to say EctoLearning’s Help modules are not the easiest to read – they’re rather cluttered looking). Like the Q&A section, Assignments can also be removed from the course group page, which I did.
• Forum: A traditional sort of discussion forum. You can create multiple threads in each group forum. You can turn on an “approval” feature as well. To end up with a sort of top-down listing of forums, I had to create them in reverse order (the Assignment 2 forum, then the Assignment 1 forum), since they listed with the newest one on top.
• Content: You have choices of adding a file, a new page, an internal link, an external link or bookmark, or pasting something from the clipboard (which is really just a special case of creating a new page). You can also create Premium Content that you can charge for. Content Pages have facilities to add a variety of assessment materials (more detail on this in the next section of the post).
• How do you invite students to participate in your course? After laying out your course, you invite students to be members of it. I set up a student account, invited this test student, and then accessed the course as that student. This is further illustrated in the video blog entry for this post.

Content Sections
One of the most powerful elements of EctoLearning appears to be the variety of “sections” you can add to content that you create for your courses.

• “Gradable” Sections: Multiple Choice Questions, Short Answer Questions, or the submission of a file (a “Flash Cards” content feature is coming soon). 
• “Content” Sections: Text & Images, a File (“Word, Powerpoint, Movie, etc.”), or a Section Separator or Header.
• “External” Sections:  A Web Feed, YouTube, Flickr, Google Gadget. I tried creating a YouTube link, which required nothing more than inserting a URL link to the video, but it only gave me a “cannot connect to YouTube” error message. I was still able to add this a link section, as I did in the Assignment 2 content I created.
• “Link” Sections: External Resource Links/Bookmarks; Internal Page link.

For an overview of the course I created in EctoLearning, please watch this companion video for this post.

Note about Edu20.org
Last week, on a second glance, I saw that Edu20.org had more functionality than I thought it had originally, so I decided it was worth checking out further. Unfortunately, when I got into it, I quickly realized that their free functionality is only available as part of a 30 day trial [Ed Note: I have an email that indicates that there is free functionality available over a longer period, but this wasn't very clear to me from their web site]. Their pricing plans run from $55 a year into the thousands, depending on the mix of functionality and numbers of students. I decided to move on to check out EctoLearning, and obviously was not disappointed.

Conclusions
Simply put, I’d have to say that EctoLearning is the best free online CMS I’ve tried so far.

Am I ready to wrap up this effort and declare them the “winner”? Not exactly, but this is a very time consuming thing to blog about (having to learn each new application and set up a little course with it) and I’m ready for a break! I’m also eager to get going on work with readers like Amy Night and her work with using popular social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook in the classroom (I’ll be doing a presentation on this topic at this year’s Campus Technology 2011 conference).

So where does that leave us with free online CMS tools? Well, I think I’ll take the cue from readers like Lee Devine, one of several who commented about using Instructure from Canvas. Another real interesting option mentioned by reader Marco Ananais is the use of Moodle on Ninehub.com. Too many possibilities and not enough time! Anyway, we’ll circle back to this topic again in a few weeks. In the meanwhile, EctoLearning stands out as the best free online CMS I’ve tried so far.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
What Are The Best Free Hosted Course Management Systems On The Internet?
Free Hosted Course Management Systems, A Closer Look – Rcampus
Creating Simple Online Courses For Free With MyiCourse
Best free online Course Management Systems … the search continues

In this post we look at SchoolRack, then review results of our look at 4 different CMS apps, and decide what’s next.

So far in this series, we’ve looked at Rcampus and MyiCourse, and now it’s time to move on to the other two candidates from our original selection of four online CMS/LMS apps that offer free functionality. 

I tried to get going with Schoology, but hit the wall almost immediately as I got a message telling me “all fields in red are required” while I was populating the four initial fields on the Create Course screen. There were no “fields in red” (unless I’ve suddenly gone colorblind). I poked around a little and then gave up, moving onto SchoolRack.

SchoolRack’s Features & Functionality
The functionality available in SchoolRack is somewhat limited, and seems to be geared towards a singular kind of use – that is, for use in just one course or class, not multiple courses or classes. I worked through creating this simple online mini-course site, and came away feeling that SchoolRack is a good free site for the elementary and maybe middle school teacher who wants to start using the web to create a simple class web site where they can interact with students or parents. Managing multiple courses with this tool appears to be impractical, but it’s a nice place to get started with some simple online course content and interactions.

• Web Pages & Posts: You can create web pages and put posts on them. It does not appear that you can nest pages. The available themes are a nice touch. Files can be uploaded and linked to web pages.
• Discussion Board: They’ve got a discussion board feature, but you can only create one. You can create multiple topics, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to create different discussions for different web pages, posts, or groups.
• Assignments: There are assignments, but they don’t have much to them – just a name, a description, possible points, a due date, and the ability to associate the assignment with a group. Also, teachers have to upgrade to the Premium Plan if they wish to be able to link attachments to assignments (students can do this to submit assignments, at no charge, it’s only teachers that have to pay if they wish to be able to link an attachment to an assignment).
• Grades: There is an ability to record a grade assignments, but not for courses overall.
• Groups & Messaging: I was able to create a group and associate an assignment or messaging with that group, which offers some possibilities for segregating work within the course, but since the web pages, posts, and discussion boards are not group specific (not that I could tell), the functionality of the groups doesn’t really provide for different course pages and discussions like a traditional CMS/LMS.
• Help: The Help Resources are pretty good.
• The Plus Version of SchoolRack is under $6/mo., but this comparative page only shows that you get more … more space, more pages, and more mailing lists, but not any additional functionality.

Conclusions (thus far)
Unfortunately, I wasn’t terribly thrilled with any of the applications I tried. The three that I was able to use each have their pros and cons, and their rightful place, but none provided the level of functionality that I had hoped for. Here are some summary statements about these four applications:

• MyiCourse: Limited functionality, but it was pretty easy to use. Too bad it didn’t have a discussion forum (I’m looking for an embeddable forum tools to see if I can integrate one myself – I’ll let you know if that leads anywhere!)  I liked the ability to charge for a course, making this tool useful to the entrepreneurial online instructor.
• Rcampus: Some good functionality here, but they had the odd twist of requiring an upgrade to a Premium version that doesn’t exist yet, in order to get certain functionality, like tests. (I was also surprised that no one at Rcampus picked up the post and offered some kind of insights or encouraging words).
• Schoology: Dead end. Couldn’t do enough with it to assess it.
• SchoolRack: Limited course management functionality, and limited ability to host separate courses/classes, but it’s pretty good for lower grades or other situations where teachers want to set up a web site for one class or course.

Next?
When I started this effort, I briefly looked at 9 sites. I selected the four above to check out as they seemed to have the most potential for little or no limits under their free or near-free offerings. Given the results, I took a closer look at the five I that originally put aside and think that two of them are worth trying out:

• Edu20.org: Looking back at what they offer, after having worked with the above apps and learned from the experience, Edu20.org looks pretty attractive, even in it’s free version.
• EctoLearning: This site is entirely free, with unlimited users and courses, but I was hesitant to work with it originally because my original interpretation after scanning their FAQs lead me to conclude that it was stronger in social networking and weaker in course management (as is the trend with many new sites out there that call themselves ‘LMS’ apps but are pretty far from it). A closer look revealed that the app looks like it includes traditional CMS/LMS elements and is worthy of a deeper dive.

After a look at these two apps, we’ll move on to some new topics. I’m really looking forward to discussing some of the great classroom uses of Twitter that have been submitted by readers in response to my post, “Do you use Facebook or Twitter in the classroom (or know someone who does)?“. In the meanwhile, I’d really love to hear from some readers about any free CMS tools they may have used, and how it has worked out - just click here to comment (thanks!).

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
What Are The Best Free Hosted Course Management Systems On The Internet?
Free Hosted Course Management Systems, A Closer Look – Rcampus
Creating Simple Online Courses For Free With MyiCourse

Our quest for free web-based CMS and LMS tools continues with a trial run and overview of MyiCourse.com.

This is the third in a series of articles in which I look at online LMS/CMS applications that offer free capabilities. In my first post, I narrowed these down to four apps that seemed to have few limitations in their free or very low cost offerings. Last week I looked more closely at Rcampus.com, and learned that while it has a lot to offer for free, some of its functionality requires an upgrade to a Premium version that isn’t available yet. This week I move on to MyiCourse.

After a couple hours creating my online “University” and a basic course in MyiCourse, and scanning tutorial materials and trying to make sure I wasn’t missing any functionality I was hoping to find, I can confidently say that MyiCourse has some strong points. At the same time, it is probably a bit too limited in capabilities to meet the needs of many instructors. So if you are looking to put up your own online courses and intend to keep it pretty simple, check out the pros and cons noted below. You may also wish to view  this tutorial that I made about the process, for further insights.

What MyiCourse does well
MyiCourse does some things well. In a nutshell, you can create simple online courses (and charge for them), with relative ease.

• It’s free, with no cost-based functional limitations, and no apparent limits on the numbers of courses or students. The only possible charges relate to the top banner ad image (see the section below for more on that).
• It is simple and pretty easy to use.
• You can create your own “online university”, with its own unique URL (I created emergingedtech.myicourse.com).
• You can create multi-page courses, with images, links, embedded videos, and audio.
• You can create multi-module courses.
• They offer good online tutorials to help learn how their system works.
• You can create courses that you charge for (great for individual entrepreneurial instructors looking to do online training for a fee).

Drawbacks and limitations of MyiCourse
Following are some of the shortcomings of this application.

• Limited capabilities. What you can do with MyiCourse is really pretty limited – you can create web pages with a reasonable level of sophistication, and you can create simple tests, but beyond that, many of the elements of today’s CMS/LMS systems are missing. For example, the lack of any sort of Discussion Board eliminated it from my consideration for a potential tool where I could host online workshops.
• MyiCourse is not robust enough for organizational/enterprise use. Some online CMS tools provide free functionality for the individual teacher, with paid membership required for access to enterprise features (integration tools, expanded support, etc.), which I feel is a good model. MyiCourse lacks the types of tools generally required for enterprise integration, and it’s lack of features is likely to eliminate it from consideration by many institutions.
• Some ads in the top banner are inappropriate for kids, forcing instructors to pay the $10/month to turn them off (granted, this is pretty nominal fee).
• MyiCourse was in beta in 2008, and some of the materials on the site still show “beta” in the logo. Given their functional limitations and a lack of information about how extensive their existing customer base is, I found myself questioning the long term viability of the platform.

Conclusions
MyiCourse appears to have its place in the sphere of online CMS tools. If you’re an entrepreneur wishing to create simple courses that you charge for, it looks pretty attractive. It’s also a fine way to get one’s “feet wet” in the waters of online CMS tools. On the other hand, some of the other apps under consideration in this series may better fit your needs. I look forward to taking Schoology.com for a test run next!

As always, comments and questions are encouraged and welcomed. Please click here and contribute!

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Exploring the World of Free Teaching Productivity Resources on the Web
What Are The Best Free Hosted Course Management Systems On The Internet?
Free Hosted Course Management Systems, A Closer Look – Rcampus

Rcampus is a fully featured application that provides a lot of it’s capabilities for free, but you will need to pay for some “premium” functions.

Last week I started researching free, hosted Course and Learning Management Systems, in search of those that provide relatively unlimited use for little or nominal cost. My focus was to find apps that could be used by teachers who wish to work with a CMS/LMS and have none in their schools (and presumably have little or no budget for it). I selected four that seemed like they might fit the bill, with the intention of coming back this week to take a deeper dive.

As I considered which to work with first, I decided to put SchoolRack to the end of the list, since they do charge a fee (albeit very small) to use their more fully featured “Plus” plan. I figured I’d give the other three a good workout to see what I could get for no cost. I signed up for Schoology, but they had to validate my school, and this took a couple days, so I moved on to Rcampus in the meanwhile.

I signed up for Rcampus, logged in, and created the beginnings of a ‘welcome’ page and some course work. I made the video below, illustrating the process. I knew going into this that Rcampus did not offer all of it’s functionality for free, but in my initial reading through their website I came away with the impression that the paid version was required only for enterprise-level functions (like integration to an SIS and that sort of thing). I quickly learned, however, that there are more limitations to their free version than I originally thought.

Rcampus is a robust application, offering extensive functionality, and is certainly worth considering if you’re looking for a Course Management System that you can use for free. It does turn out though that some features, such as Tests/Quizzes, and some advanced editing capabilities, are only available under their Premium paid version. This in and of itself is does not exclude Rcampus from further consideration, but unfortunately the Premium version is not available yet, and I saw no information about when it would be available, what it would cost, or what other differences exist between the free version and this new Premium version.

Perhaps when they do release this information, it will turn out that the fee for Premium use is nominal, making Rcampus worth continuing to trial and learn about. In the meanwhile I’m looking forward to learning more about other contenders for the “Best Free Hosted CMS/LMS” crown.

Next Week
Next week we will continue our closer look at the tools originally selected last week. My next two targets are Schoology and MyiCourse. I hope you’ll come back and join us.

Your feedback is welcomed and encouraged!
As always here on EmergingEdTech, I and my readers love to hear from other site visitors, and to share experiences and insights (after all, this sort of dialogue is one of the most important reasons I’ve developed this site and write these articles). We are all on a learning journey, and learning from others is a wonderful part of the process. Questions are also welcomed and encouraged, so please be don’t hesitate to drop a comment and share your observations, ideas, or inquiries! Thanks.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
What Are The Best Free Hosted Course Management Systems On The Internet?
Moodle 2.0 versus Blackboard 9.1 – a Brief Comparison
Exploring the World of Free Teaching Productivity Resources on the Web

“Round 1” in a look at the many free, richly featured CMS & LMS apps available in the cloud.

What options exist for teachers who want to try using a Course Management System, but don’t have one available in their school? Fortunately, there are many free CMS/LMS tools available on the Internet. The heavy snows across the US this winter pushed the value of these tools to the forefront of my mind – courses hosted in a Learning Management System position students and teachers to keep course work moving forward when schools are closed due to inclement weather.

There are actually so many free and low cost CMS tools out there that learning about them turned out to be very time consuming. I spent many hours searching and reviewing web sites, and selected the most impressive looking tools to list below. I created two groupings of these applications – those that provide unlimited use for teachers for free or for nominal fees, and those that have useful free functionality but charge higher costs for full capabilities.

I should also mention that there are also plenty of free open source LMS/CMS platforms available, with Moodle and Sakai leading the way, but they require that you either install and maintain them locally, or pay for hosting. So while these powerful tools are free for licensing, they require equipment and technical talent and time to put in place and maintain. In this post, we’re only looking at free hosted options.

Options Providing Unlimited Courses & Unlimited Users
These applications appear to have extensive functionality, and offer a full range of functionality to individual instructors for free or for nominal fees. I’m really looking forward to learning more about some of these tools when I take a closer look at selected apps next week.

There are so many free productivity tools available on the Internet for today’s educators. I’m creating a resource page that list many of the most useful ones, and I’d love to have your input!

By “productivity” tools and resources, I am referring to tools that can help teachers get their jobs done more efficiently or effectively, at no cost (beyond the effort required to use the resources, of course). There are so many of these types of tools out on the Internet – sites providing free lesson materials, quiz and test banks, worksheets and flash cards, and much more.

READERS: CLICK HERE (or the tab in top menu) TO ACCESS THE “Free Productivity Resources For Educators” PAGE that this post resulted in

It would be nice to have a page here on EmergingEdTech where I would collect and organize links to good quality sites like this as I come across them, a page that educators could reference any time that they are looking for these types of resources. My goal with this series of posts is to lay a foundation for such a page – a list of free productivity resources intended specifically for educators, grouped into logical categories. I will limit the listing to better quality sites (those with more resources, better organization, easier use, etc.), and update it regularly.

I did a lot of searching around the ‘net for this sort of thing over the long holiday weekend, and developed a list of categories, with some example sites for each category. Defining these categories and organizing them in an informative way seems to me to be the biggest challenge here – once the categories are in place, it’s easy to find and add listings of sites. I realize there are many sites out there that offer similar listings, but most of them don’t seem to be very well organized. I am hopeful that you, the reader, will share your ideas and input, and help me expand and organize this listing to make it highly useful.

Here’s my first draft of some categories, with examples of each (if you know of better resources in these categories, please comment and let us know about them!):

Activity & Materials Creators

• Awards Certificates: www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/index.shtml#awardCertificates
• Bookmarks and Book Plates: www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/index.shtml#book
• Calendars & Classroom Organizers: www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/index.shtml#book
• Flash Cards – Create Your Own at StudyStack (have to register): www.studystack.com/CreateStack.jsp
• Flash Card Exchange (register for adv. functions): www.flashcardexchange.com
• Form filler (have to register): www.fillanypdf.com
• Holiday & Seasonal Worksheets: www.abcteach.com/directory/seasonal/
• Puzzle Maker (lots of types – word search, math squares, mazes, much more!): puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com
• Word Search Puzzles (lots of them): www.thepotters.com/puzzles.html
• Worksheets (lots of preformatted worksheets): www.superteacherworksheets.com

Communications Tools (Print & Electronic)

• EducationWorld Newsletters & Parent Communications:  www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/index.shtml#newsletters
• TeacherFiles: www.teacherfiles.com/resources_newsletters.htm

Course Management Systems & LMS alternatives
(You have to register to use these tools, so you can save your own personalized content. Note that these tools are generally more involved than many of the other resources on this page.)

• Blackboard’s “CourseSites”: coursesites.blackboard.com/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp
• rCampus: http://www.rcampus.com/help/about/course_and_learning_management_system.cfm
• Schoology: www.schoology.com

Clipart

• DiscoveryEducation: school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart
• School-Clipart: www.school-clipart.com
• TeacherFiles: www.teacherfiles.com/clip_art.htm

Interactives (for White Boards, or Powerpoint)

• ABCTeach: www.abcteach.com/directory/interactive
• Promethean Plant (have to register): www.prometheanplanet.com
• SMART Exchange: exchange.smarttech.com
• TopMarks: www.topmarks.co.uk/Interactive.aspx

Lesson Plans

• AtoZ Teacher Stuff: atozteacherstuff.com/Lesson_Plans/index.shtml
• Discovery Education: school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans
• LessonPlansPage: www.lessonplanspage.com
• Scholastic: www2.scholastic.com/browse/lessonplans.jsp
• Teacher.net: teachers.net/lessons

Open Educational Resources

• OER Consortium: oerconsortium.org
• OER Commons: www.oercommons.org

Quizzes & Tests
(These types of sites require sign up)

• Easy Test Maker: www.easytestmaker.com
• Quizstar: quizstar.4teachers.org/indexi.jsp

Rubrics

• 4TEachers: rubistar.4teachers.org
• Rubrics4Teachers: www.rubrics4teachers.com
• iRubrics: www.rcampus.com/indexrubric.cfm

Seeking Your Input!
Is there a category that you think I am missing (I struggled with certain types of free tools that can be useful, but are not intended specifically for educators, and decided for now to leave them off the list, to help keep it manageable). Do you have any favorite productivity tools that you think I should add to one of these categories? Are you aware of better resources than those I have listed? Have you used any of these tools and had a particularly good or bad experience? I need your informed input to help me refine these listings and make them all solid recommendations. Please comment and share your knowledge.

Next
As the next few weeks roll by, I’ll be using reader input and further research to continue to update and organize this collection of resources.  Next Sunday I’ll put up the new page - I’ll rename the “Free Tools & Resources” tab to “Free Productivity Tools & Resources”, and build out an organized, formatted page of resources.

[Incidentally, I do realize that this is slightly off-topic from the site's main theme of "engaging students and enhancing learning outcomes", but it's still about leveraging technology for educator's needs, and I'm sure you'll forgive the "transgression"! - KW]

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Taking a look at some of the similarities and differences between the newest versions of these two popular LMS’s.

Thanks to contributor Olivia Coleman (olivia.coleman33@gmail.com) for collaboratively developing this guest post.

Moodle and Blackboard are both popular online learning platforms with which educators can develop complete online course that can include multimedia content. But how do the two compare to each other and what are the benefits unique to each course delivery system? We will explore some of these benefits in this article, discussing Moodle 2.0 and Blackboard 9.1 respectively.

First let’s talk about what Moodle and Blackboard are.

Moodle is an Open Source Learning Management System that is provided freely and can be run on many operating systems. It’s “free to download, change, share, improve, and customize to whatever you want it to be,” according to the Moodle website. Therefore, any educator can use it to build or supplement a course.

Blackboard on the other hand is a proprietary Learning Management System and its use is typically limited to educators at institutions which pay a fee each year to take on a license agreement for its use. Blackboard Learn 9.1 is only one of many offerings from the software company Blackboard, Inc.

Moodle 2.0
Moodle 2.0 has been touted as Moodle’s “biggest release ever” with tons of upgrades, and its release is scheduled for this month. You can read up-to-date information on all the improvements Moodle 2.0 will have over the previous version here.

New features revolve around increased usability, these include: easier navigation, improved user profiles, community hub publishing and downloading, a new interface for messaging, and a feature that allows teachers to check student work for plagiarism. Text formats will also allow plug-ins for embedded photos and videos in text (Blackboard 9.1 allows for this too).

A major improvement over previous releases is that anyone can set up a community hub, which is a public or private directory of courses. Another notable feature is that Moodle now allows teachers to search all public community hubs and download courses to use as templates for building their own courses. Also, teachers can now see when a student completes a certain activity or task and can also see reports on a student’s progress in a course.

Many small scale open source platforms require that users support them themselves, leveraging the open source community as their primary resource. For Moodle however, it is so popular that a small industry has evolved around it, providing a wide range of support and services. Two of the most popular support and hosting services are  Moodlerooms and Remote-Learner.

Blackboard 9.1
Blackboard Learn 9.1 is Blackboard’s newest and most innovative upgrade to its Blackboard Learn package.

Improvements in its uses for higher education include course wikis (Moodle improved theirs too), blogs and journals that stimulate conversation and reflection on a course, and group tools that make group collaboration and communication easier than the previous version. Its most notable feature is its Web 2.0 interface, which makes it easy for educators to navigate when adding content to an online course and for students to navigate when accessing course content. 

Blackboard Learn 9.1 also incorporates Blackboard Connect (at an additional cost), which alerts students to deadlines, due dates and academic priorities within a course. The new release also allows educators to more easily incorporate videos and photos directly into text for a more complete learning experience.  Finally, 9.1 features Blackboard Mobile Learn (also at an additional cost), which lets students connect to their online courses using various handheld devices, such as the iPhone or iPad.

For more information about Blackboard Learn 9.1, click here.

So, what are the big differentiators?

Features & Functions: Both of these tools have a lot of different functionality available, either natively, or through add-on types of functionality. If different functions are going to be the deciding factor in selecting one of these versus the other, you will really need to drill in and compare and decide for yourselves which features and functions make the difference for your institution.

Cost: This is clearly different. As an open source product, Moodle is simply less expensive. Blackboard is sort of the “Rolls Royce” of today’s LMS, and there are users of the product who would tell you that if you want the best LMS money can buy, you should make the financial commitment to Blackboard. On the other hand, if you want a premier product for a much lower cost, Moodle is really the way to go. Another thing to be aware of is that Blackboard builds substantial annual increases into their pricing model, since they are continually procuring and integration additional products into their offerings, with the intent of adding value for their users.

Product/vendor model: As indicated above, Moodle and Blackboard are very different products with very different vendor models. One is open source, and there are many support and service vendors to choose from, while the other is proprietary and there is just the one company to work with. How that impacts your decision is up to you and your institution to determine.

Guest poster Olivia Coleman writes on the topics of online colleges and universities. 

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The Schoology LMS provides a lot of functionality for free