Downloads
This is the place to sample training software, calculators, cool web services, and other helpful workplace tools. All demos, trials, and tools are FREE!, but some of the tools require registration. Each month we will take a look at a new suite of tools. Send submissions to rellis@astd.org.
June 2009 – Favorite YouTube Downloads
Common Craft "Plain English" Series
Rather than point to a list of suppliers on a certain topic, this month LC is recommending that readers download Common Craft’s educational videos on YouTube. Common Craft produces a series of short online videos (average length is 3 minutes) to explain current technology in an accessible and entertaining way. Their “Plain English” videos are an excellent way to easily point colleagues, family, and friends at concise descriptions of technical advances, such as social networking tools, blogs, and RSS. And because they’re on YouTube, they’re free.
Here are a number of videos that are likely to be of interest:
For more, just go to YouTube and type in any topic + the words “Plain English” to see a video.
May 2009 – Mashup Editors
Mozilla Ubiquity
Mozilla Labs, the same group that created the Firefox web browser, has launched a prototype of a software service that lets nontechnical Web users create mashups, those marriages of applications, such as Google Maps and other information to create more useful apps. Ubiquity is fairly Web 2.0-centric, with emphasis on inserting maps anywhere, using social network sites like Digg and Twitter, as well as searching Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube.
Jackbe
Jackbe delivers trusted enterprise mashup software that empowers organizations to create, customize, and collaborate through enterprise mashups for faster decisions and better business results. Its innovative enterprise mashup software, Presto, provides dynamic enterprise mashups that leverage internal and external data while meeting the toughest enterprise security and governance requirements.
Yahoo! Pipes
Yahoo! Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here are a few popular ways the service can be used create your ultimate custom feed by combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating them; geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map; remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application; and build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
IBM Mashup Center 60-Day Trial
IBM® Mashup Center is designed to provide an easy to use business mashup solution, supporting line of business assembly of dynamic situational applications, with the security and governance capabilities IT requires. With this lightweight mashup environment, organizations can unlock and transform enterprise, web, personal and departmental information into consumable or "mashable" assets, including information feeds and widgets.
April 2009 – Mobile Learning Authoring Tools
Learning Mobile Author – Free Trial
Learning Mobile Author (LMA) from Hot Lava Software is an easy-to-use development tool that allows you to generate mobile content and deploy it to any handheld or mobile device. Unlike traditional mobile content development, LMA allows you to create mobile content once and deploy it in multiple formats to multiple handhelds and mobile phones.
Emantras MobLS Demo
Emantras’ MobLS platform provides organizations and individuals a location agnostic learning and reference platform to enhance performance. This innovative mobile learning solution seamlessly weaves electronic book features to support referenceware and a comprehensive mobile learning system that has the ability to synchronize data and metrics with SCORM / AICC compliant native LMS systems.
Mobile Chalkboard Demo
Mobile Chalkboard is a messaging platform for high priority training and communications. It facilitates the creation, secure delivery and tracking of media-rich mobile pushcasts, which are sent to your audience's smartphones and also accessible on the desktop.
March 2009: Open Source Learning Management
Moodle
Moodle is a free, open source course management system (CMS) used by educators to create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students. Moodle has a large and diverse user community with more than 330,000 registered users, speaking over 70 languages in 196 countries. Moodle is available in a variety of download packages with different levels of stability, as well as via CVS. A number of additional modules/plugins and language packs are also available.
Sakai
Sakai is a free and open source product that can be used to create online collaboration and learning environments. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration. Sakai is built and maintained by the Sakai community, which is actively developing new Sakai tools: IMS Common Cartridge, SCORM, blog tool, shared whiteboard, shared display, multipoint audio, multipoint audio, pod-casting, IMS Tool Interoperability, and others.
ATutor
ATutor is an open source web-based learning content management system (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, develop custom themes to give ATutor a new look, and easily extend its functionality with feature modules. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment.
February 2009: Authoring Tools
ToolBook 21-Day Free Trial
ToolBook provides a comprehensive solution with everything you need to quickly create engaging interactive content, quizzes, assessments, and simulations. With the newest ToolBook 9.5 version, you can now easily turn your PowerPoint files into SCORM-compliant courses and create rich learning content for your mobile learning. Try ToolBook 9.5 free for 21 days! Get your free trial now.
CourseLab—Free, Free, Free!
CourseLab is a powerful, yet easy-to-use, e-learning authoring tool that offers programming-free WYSIWYG environment for creating high-quality interactive e-learning content that can be published on the Internet, learning management system (LMS), CD-ROMs, and other devices. And it is FREE!
Lectora 14-Day Trial
The Lectora Publisher authoring tool provides you with the ability to create and publish content quickly, easily, and independently. Key features include drag-and-drop capability, extended file support, advanced testing elements and wizards, customized templates, and metadata support. It is ideal for those who desire quick, easy content creation as well as complex content creation for adaptive e-learning. New features in the latest version include a Flash and games library, chart creator, and note reports, as well as the ability to publish to the iPhone.
January 2009: Digital Notebooks
Microsoft OneNote 60-Day Trial
Office OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that provides people one place to gather their notes and information, powerful search to find what they are looking for quickly, and easy-to-use shared notebooks so that they can manage information overload and work together more effectively. Office OneNote 2007 is an integrated part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system that makes it easy to gather, organize, find, and share your notes and information more efficiently and effectively. Powerful search capabilities can help you locate information from text within pictures or from spoken words in audio and video recordings. And easy-to-use collaborative tools help teams work together with all of this information in shared notebooks, whether online or offline.
Google Notebook
Google Notebook enables users to clip and collect information as they surf the web. User can then access information later from any computer by visiting the Notebook website or clicking the Notebook icon in their browser. Download the extension to access Google Notebook and all its functionality without ever leaving the web page you're on; you can view your notebooks, organize them into sections, add notes of your own, and more. Open and close the mini Google Notebook by simply clicking the notebook icon in your browser's status bar. Quickly add clippings of web content (images, text and links) straight to your notebook by highlighting the content you want and clicking the "Clip" button in the mini Google Notebook.
Check out 2008 Downloads here.
Send submissions to rellis@astd.org.