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BY BILL FERRIS

The server outage that was scheduled for Saturday, March 13 and Sunday March 14 has been canceled. The DataCenter Operations team and Facilities teams were able to resolve the maintenance issues without any down time. We hate to issue reatractions like this, but at least it’s a retraction with good news.

BY BILL FERRIS

I love mind maps for organizing ideas. You can find a lot of slick online mind-mapping applications. My only complaint with most of them, though, is that you have to spend a little time messing around with establishing a structure and selecting the word balloons and arrows and such. Fortunately, Text 2 Mind Map lets you skip all that rigmarole and get right to the idea stage.

Text 2 Mind Map allows you to simply type in your ideas. To help T2MM differentiate between big ideas and their sub-ideas, simply use a hierarchical structure, similar to a bulleted list without the bullets. Take this example from their website:

Months of the year Winter December January February Spring March April May Summer June July August Autumn September October November

T2MM then converts this structure into a mind map, pictured here. Indenting a line tells T2MM that it’s a branch of the idea above it. When you’re done, simply save it as a JPEG file to your hard drive. Text 2 Mind Map is an easy, no fuss way to record your ideas without letting icons, buttons and clip art gum up your creative process.

Text 2 Mind Map

Related stuff:

Collaborate simply, graphically, with Scribblar

Inspiration in the cloud: MyWebspiration

Those are some Lovely Charts you’ve got there

Share diagrams and mind maps online with Gliffy

A task force to expand the state's online programs at colleges and universities could boost growing programs at local schools, officials say. Online classes are a way for students to gain college credit without entering the classroom. Lectures, homework, discussions and sometimes testing are all handled through the Internet. Bruce Chaloux, an online-learning expert who works at the Southern Educational Regional Board, said national enrollment in online courses is growing at about 17 percent per year compared to 1.2 percent annual growth for traditional college classes. But Chaloux said there is still a lot of room to improve.

University of Wisconsin Oshkosh students can now work on part of their foreign language requirements from home. Hybrid courses, a mix of online learning and in-the-classroom instruction, are being introduced as part of the foreign language department’s 2010 Summer Session offerings.

Any residual doubt regarding the explosive growth potential of distance education may have been dispelled last month, when the AFL-CIO announced it was teaming up with the National Labor College and the Princeton Review to launch an online college for the labor federation's 11.5 million members and their families. With projected courses in allied health sciences, business and other disciplines at an estimated $200 per credit, you could almost hear the whir of file servers straining under the anticipated load.

Here’s what we were up to at this time last year, in no particular order:

Instructifeature: Make graphing fun with an interactive white board

Google SketchUp: free & easy 3D modeling

Field trip to Jordan: No tickets required with Project Explorer

Certification Map - Where do you want to teach?

Speed up your reading with Spreeder

Old words make a comeback at Save the Words

Convert PDF files to editable documents easily with PDF to Word

Avoid sticky situations with the Virtual Drosophila Lab

Power up your math skills with Interactivate

YouTube EDU features educational videos online

Pam Ice, online support director for the Colorado Department of Education, said recently, “Students in Colorado continue to see the value of online learning. The 2008-09 school year brought improvements in student success in many of Colorado’s online programs. Graduation rates and completion rates increased, more programs employ guidance counselors and credentialed staff for special education and English Language Learners. These efforts are paying off for the programs.” The Colorado Department of Education monitors 18 online programs around the state, ranging in size from the six-student Crowley County Online Academy to the Colorado Virtual Academy with more than 5,000 students.

The stage for redemption, it turns out, can be a dingy, florescent-lit room tucked down a long hall at Sharpstown High School. Here, on mismatched chairs and a second-hand sofa, teens toil on laptops for hours on end — trying to atone for bad decisions and reclaim their dreams of earning high school diplomas. The Grad Lab — as it's being called at Sharpstown and the Houston Independent School District's 26 other comprehensive high schools — has become a focal point for would-be dropouts since opening in January. More than 100 students come each day, even Saturdays, trying to make good on their second chance.

In Berkshire County, where online courses weren't available even 10 years ago, more than 1,000 high school and college students are enrolled today in online courses -- ranging from bio-ethics symposiums to Mandarin Chinese."This is the technology generation," said Carol Arnold, a Virtual High School spokeswoman. "They live on instant messaging and email and Facebook, so this is really tapping into that."

Instructify and LEARN NC will be offline for scheduled maintenance beginning Saturday, March 13 at 4 p.m. until Sunday, March 14 at 9 a.m. This will also affect LEARN NC’s online courses offered through Moodle. We apologize for any inconvenience.

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

My daughter, who is three, sent me a picture message from school yesterday (with the help of her teacher), and it just reinforced the reality that children are accessing the internet and mobile devices much younger these days. While the internet is such a valuable resource to bring concepts to life and research new topics, it also has large areas we would our kids not see. Figuring out a feasible plan to not only protect your kids from the seedy side of the internet but also explain to them why you’re doing it can be a delicate balancing act.

The people at NetSmartz are trying to make internet safety and education a little easier. NetSmartz is divided into sections tailored for specific groups — parents, teachers, children, teens, and law enforcement. Within each subset you will find information and activities to help you create a workable solution to internet protection. As we zoom forward in the miniaturization of technology age, the issue of internet exposure to younger and younger demographics is only going to grow, it’s a good idea to be proactive on self-educating yourselves on this.

NetSmartz

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Under the bipartisan bill, when a district cancels school, it could immediately post lessons to its Web site for each grade level or class, allowing students to download the material and turn in the work within two weeks. The bill would let schools use the e-lessons to replace up to five days missed because of snow, ice or other unscheduled closures. Supporters say the bill also could have an extra benefit: pushing districts to blend technology with classroom work to expand student learning beyond the traditional school day or year.

Ohio students who may be used to sledding or playing video games on snow days could instead be given schoolwork via computer, under a proposal from state lawmakers. A bill offered by a bipartisan group of legislators would let schools use online lessons so as many as five school days called off for bad weather or other calamities would not have to be made up. Districts could immediately post assignments on their Web sites for students to complete within two weeks.

Hybrid foreign language courses introduced for summer - Amanda Munger, UW Oshkosh TodayUniversity of Wisconsin Oshkosh students can now work on part of their foreign language requirements from home. Hybrid courses, a mix of online learning and in-the-classroom instruction, are being introduced as part of the foreign language department’s 2010 Summer Session offerings.
Catherine Bryan, co-chair of the foreign language department, said hybrid classes combine the convenience of online courses and the personal learning of regular classes.

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Growing up during the tail end of the Cold War, I heard the phrase “Be happy you don’t live in the U.S.S.R because…” many times in relation to things I felt were unfair. As a child you don’t really have an appreciation for the ways legal systems and governments work outside of the United States. Until I got to middle school I didn’t know what a parliament was outside of a brand of cigarettes.

To get a better sense of how the rest of the world works, the website JuriGlobe is an excellent resource you can point students to or reference yourself when they ask those gotcha questions in class like “Is Turkmenistan’s legal system based on a Common Law or Civilist model?”

Provided by the good folks at the University of Ottawa in Canada, the website has a great deal of information about the governmental and legal structures of every country in the world. You can get this information in a table or on a map. In addition to legal and governmental structures, JuriGlobe has a wealth of information on linguistics and international trade as well. There is certainly enough information here to have students complete a research project on a foreign country, and like I said before, it’s a great resource to keep in your digital back pocket in case of an international stumper. Oh, and just because I know your dying to know, Turkmenistan is based on a Civilist model.

JuriGlobe

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YouTube said Thursday that it will start automatically captioning videos on its site, opening up a huge share of its content to people who are hearing-impaired, and a first step in creating a network of videos that could be subtitled between many languages. For now, YouTube can only transcribe videos uploaded in English into text, which can then be translated into text captions in other languages. But given the 20 hours of video content that YouTube uploads each minute, the San Bruno unit of Google said this is the largest effort ever tried on the Internet to harness evolving speech recognition technology to caption video content.
Editor Note: Imagine the impact on online learning! Open captioning of video - automatically upon upload! Auto-Translation available to all viewers!

If the contents of a course are the same, it doesn’t make sense to differentiate between online classes and regular classes. Online courses cost less, can be completed in a time frame the student chooses and sometimes have almost open book tests. Why wouldn’t students want to take courses this way? Online courses are going to continue to grow. Whatever the decision — to denote or not to denote — it will make little difference.

When the University announced it was switching from its long-standing online learning management system WebCT to eLearning Commons, Kelly Wright was a bit concerned. “I’ve been used to dealing with WebCT and it took me a while to get comfortable with it,” said Wright. “Now I’m having to re-teach myself on another system that some of my professors are new to too. It’s a bit confusing.” Wright, a pre-Business major from Peachtree City, has started to figure out eLC’s features, however, and now prefers it over the old WebCT system she called “clunky.” It is a description students and professors agree on.

After public demonstrations of two online learning management systems—Desire2Learn and Remote-Learner—in January, the Office of Information Technologies has elected to replace Blackboard with Desire2Learn. The switch to Desire2Learn is not yet official. OIT is working on a contract to establish the amount of support they can expect from Desire2Learn, when to begin implementation of the product on campus and the price—OIT Chief Information Officer Sharon Blanton estimated $200,000.

Students spend a great deal of time online, and teachers may wonder how they can best teach students to use -- or disregard -- the information they find. Created by the Intute organization in the UK, "Encouraging Critical Thinking Online" consists of two teaching units for use in classroom settings. Visitors will note that the exercises can be used individually or consecutively. The resources "encourage students to think carefully and critically about the information sources they use," and the lessons learned are broadly applicable to range of humanities disciplines. Here visitors will find a teacher's guide and the two units that ask students to use the Internet to explore a question with multiple possible answers and also to gauge public opinion on a controversial topic. From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2010. http://scout.wisc.edu/