Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0

Part 1 of 3: Original Source

With the start of the new school year, many teachers and students are seeking new products and technologies to help them through their upcoming academics. With the increase of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise. To me, the growing interest for web-based learning is amazing, which brought me to thinking; what if I were to consolodate some of the helpful online products and services that can help students, teachers and administrators alike? Well, I convinced myself. The following is a compilation of Web 2.0 products that I’ve personally researched and tested. These services are grouped into two main categories: “Tools”; and “Office Applications”. Some more specific services include: organizers, gradebooks, research tools, document managers, diagrams, and more.

There are going to be three parts to the “Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0″ series: part one covering tools; part two covering office applications; and in part three, real cases of Web 2.0 used in classrooms around the world. I hope that this series becomes a valuable resource for students, teachers, and school administrators alike. On a last note, part two is almost complete and I expect to publish it within a day or two followed by part three shortly after.

Part 1: Tools

Organizers

• Stu.dicio.us: Student organizer and social notetaking tool where students can create a schedule, track their grades, manage a to do list, store files for classes, and write public notes in an outline-like format. Stu.dicio.us also allows students to connect with friends and soon will include Facebook integration. More on Stu.dicio.us.
• Gradefix: Best described by Gradefix, “Gradefix intelligently organizes and prioritizes all of your homework so you are always on top of it.” Students that use Gradefix create a study schedule used to best spreadout and prioritize homework throughout the week in hopes to decrease stress and improve grades.
• Chalksite (Teachers): Chalksite is a system built for teachers, students, and parents providing teachers with an easy to use central point where they can communicate with students and parents, post assignments and grades, send messages, and manage a website for their courses. More on Chalksite.
• Engrade (Teachers): Similar to Chalksite, Engrade allows teachers to create an account and have direct communication with students and their parents. Teachers can manage student grades, track attendance, schedule upcoming homework, and provide students and parents progress reports.
• mynoteIT: (New release came out the other day) An online note taking tool for students including a WYSIWYG note editor, assignment reminders, grade management, to do lists, and more. Students can also share notes with friends and receive feedback through commenting on notes.
• Haiku LMS (Teachers): Haiku has yet to launch, but its feature set sounds promising making it worth mentioning. Haiku provides a system for teachers where they can create a public website for their classes, manage content, list assignments and announcements, track grades, and more. Sounds like a similar application to Chalksite.
• CollegeRuled: Academic organizer, class scheduler, and message board area for students. Students can either create a schedule or connect to their Facebook schedule with CollegeRuled and take notes and manage a to do list for each class. Note: I have not been able to test CollegeRuled as it requires an .edu email address.
• Backpack: Backpack is an all around great organizer including note taking, file storage, to do lists, a calendar, and more. An example use could be that students can create pages in their organizer for each class and manage notes on class discussions as well as upload related files and class documents.
• PocketMod: This isn’t really a “Web 2.0″ product, but I felt it’s worth mentioning. Pocketmod is a small tool for creating disposable paper organizers using print out templates covering just about anything from note paper to reference sheets. It’s perfect for students that prefer keeping organized on paper. Also, it’s just helpful to carry around with you for whenever you may need to jot some things down.
• JotSpot: JotSpot is a free wiki allowing users to create and share documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and more. It is my top pick for a wiki and provides a great set of features. Users can even install other applications from an application gallery to extend their wiki with project managers, to do lists, photo galleries, and other applications. It may be a little on the advanced side for students and teachers, but if your tech savvy, have at it.

Gradebooks

• Teacher! (Teachers): Teacher, formerly known as Teacherly, is an online grading tool for teachers where they can create classes, add students, and track grades for all assignments and test scores. I would imagine it would work out fine for students as well wanting to track their own grades in classes. Unfortunately, Teacher is not accepting new users at this time but you can signup to be notified when they do and check out a demo in the meantime.
• Stu.dicio.us: Built into the Stu.dicio.us organizer comes a very simple grade manager allowing students to assign grade categories (homework, quiz, tests, etc.) and grades to each of their classes.
• mynoteIT: Students with an mynoteIT account can login and access their classes where they can add grade sections and grades. What’s nice too is that unlike Stu.dicio.us, mynoteIT gives the student a clear look with letter grades rather then just percentages and averages.
• Chalksite (Teachers): Designed for teacher, student, and parent communication, Chalksite provides teachers with online gradebooks where they select their class and simply fill in grades for each assignment that they have sent to their students. Students and parents can then login to their account to view their grades.
• Engrade (Teachers): The Engrade online gradebook is built to be flexible to a teachers needs where they can add assignments, create weighted grading categories, customize grading scales (A, B, C, Pass, Fail, etc.), and more. Students and parents can also login and view their grade report.

For Teachers, Clubs, and Management

• Groupvine: A service designed to help bring group members together to keep track of events, tasks, and news. Great for students in clubs, professors teaching specific topics, and campus management. For a screencast, view Screeniac.
• Nuvvo: Teachers wanting to teach online can use Nuvvo providing them with their own online learning portal. Teachers can can add courses that anyone can find and enroll in as well as charge for the online courses. They can manage students, class curriculum, quizzes, and more importantly, learn pages (allowing for headings, text, files, images, and video) that their students will be reading throughout the course.
• Schoopy: Built to strengthen community communication, Schoopy provides a system in which teachers can manage participating teachers, students, and parents and send messages, ask questions, keep up with assignments and even take quizes. Communities/Schools also can create a public website making it easy for students and parents to keep up with recent updates.
• Tuggle: Tuggle, launching Fall 2006, is a web-based organization tool for student leaders to manage groups, online payments, bulk email and texting, and more.
• Chalksite: A web package developed for teachers to help create a class website and a central point of communication with students and parents. Manage class assignments, student grades, and even a public blog.
• Engrade: “Engrade is a free online gradebook that allows teachers to manage their classes online as well as post grades, assignments, attendance, and upcoming homework online for students and parents to see.”
• Haiku LMS: Haiku has yet to launch, but its feature set sounds promising making it worth mentioning. Haiku provides a system for teachers where they can create a public website for their classes, manage content, list assignments and announcements, track grades, and more. Sounds like a similar application to Chalksite.
• Zoho Challenge: Online test tool where you can easily create tests, send tests to candidates (students, in this case), and view results with visual reports and straight forward grading (pass or fail).

Mathematics

• Calcoolate: Calcoolate provides users with a simple calculator with advanced expression support, mathematic functions, and history for viewing past calculations.
• Calcr: Similar to Calcoolate, Calcr is a web-based calculator with mathematic expression and function support as well as history logging in a very minimalist design.
• Create a Graph: Create a Graph is a free tool by Students’ Classroom that aims to make it easy for students to create bar graphs, line graphs, area graphs, pie charts, and point graphs. Navigate through its easy to understand visual interface to add data and customize graphs.
• e-Tutor Graphing Calculator: Advanced web-based graphing calculator allowing students to enter one or more equations and view them with position/intersection indicators and zooming functionality.

Resume Building

• Emurse: Great service built for job hunters that want to create, send, and share a professional resume. Users can view their resume’s statistics, send out their resume via fax and ground mail, and receive a public or private web address. One of my favorite applications of the year. More on Emurse.
• hResume Creator: Helpful tool for the tech savvy crowd that want to create a Microformat compatible resume for their website. Simply fill out the hResume form covering basic resume information and retrieve an HTML file which you can use to copy-n-paste into your website. You can then style the resume as you wish with basic CSS if your not thrilled with the default appearance.
• Amiko: Amiko does not appear to work or be officially launched yet, but I have been keeping an eye on it for the last month or so and hope to try it out soon. It appears to be a service that allows users to create and manage an online resume although it’s feature set does not look all that promising compared to Emurse. Note: The signup form doesn’t seem to work for me and I’ve tried reporting it as a bug, but the bug form did not work either. I’ll keep my eye on it.

To Do’s and Note Taking

Note: I did not list all of the note taking solutions I am aware of as I’ve already made a roundup of 50 notetaking tools here at Solution Watch, but I will add a few new student specific ones that I have recently come across.

• 25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive: Solution Watch roundup of 25 web-based task managers that can be helpful for students wanting to keep track of homework and upcoming quizzes. Be sure to check visitor comments for more.
• Fifty Ways to Take Notes: Another Solution Watch roundup including over 50 ways to take notes using various web-based tools in seven categories.
• NoteMesh: Best described by NoteMesh, “There are plenty of notes services out there; NoteMesh is a different way of thinking about your notes. Collaborate with your classmates to create a unified set of notes for your class. It’s like Wikipedia for your notes.” Note: School email address required when registering.
• Notecentric: Notecentric is a new notetaking site designed to help university students have their notes wherever they are and easily share them with fellow classmates. You can add multiple classes to your account and save notes to them using a WYSIWYG editor. Note: School email address required when registering.
• NoteTango: Free and collaborative note sharing site, launched just days ago, that allows students to create and share notes online and search notes created by other students.

Learning and Research

• EasyBib: An “automatic bibliography composer” that lets users enter sources and fill out a simple forms to be given MLA style bibliographies. I’ve used this multiple times in the past for research papers.
• Ottobib: Similar to EasyBib, Ottobib is a simple bibliography tool that allows users to enter multiple ISBN numbers for books at a time and retrieve the bibliographies in MLA, APA, AMA, or Chicago/Turabian format.
• Nuvvo: Nuvvo offers a service where students can search for courses to enroll in online on any just about any topic. It’s a fun and easy way for students to learn and they can select from free or paid courses.
• Diigo: Social annotation and bookmarking service where users can bookmark sites and add highlights and notes to them. Great for research. In fact, I used Diigo to help organize bookmarks and notes for this post.
• Wizlite: “Wizlite allows you to highlight text (like on real paper) on any page on the Internet and share it with everybody (or just your friends).”
• Mindpicnic: Similar to Nuvvo, Mindpicnic offers a service where users can create courses and find and study interesting courses full of media, links, flash cards, and more.
• Answers.com: Excellent site for researching anything at all. Make a search and receive results from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other information sources.
• Wikipedia: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia under a Wiki platform that is written and maintained by volunteers. It has possibly grown to be todays largest reference site and encyclopedia on the Internet.
• Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking site where users can save bookmarks and organize them with tags. Users can also take advantage of their del.icio.us network allowing them to add friends to their account and keep track of bookmarks left by each friend.
• Zotero: Next-generation research tool for Firefox that is currently in private beta. With Zotero, users can capture citation information, store media and websites, take notes, and more all within their browser. Note: Zotero is in private beta and I have not had the chance to try it out and will keep my eye on it.
• Newsvine: I could have picked any ol’ news site for this post, but Newsvine is, in my opinion, the best news source for students. It’s a clean and friendly social news site containing articles from the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as user contributions. Students can browse the site comfortably, rate news articles, participate in article discussion, and even start their own news column where they can write and publish articles. More on Newsvine.

Media Sharing

• Youtube: YouTube has quickly grown to be one of the most popular websites on the Internet. I personally use it for entertainment, although you can find a great deal of educational videos as well as create an account to upload your own videos for free. Students can research the site (may come across inappropriate content here and there) and even create projects with video and share them on the web.
• Google Video: Similar to YouTube, Google Video allows users to search, upload, and share videos online for free. I’m a fan of YouTube, but Google comes on top when it comes to quality educational videos. Google Video even has an educational category providing hour long videos and caption/subtitled videos (new).
• Flickr: Explore, upload, and share photos online. Includes commenting and neat note functionality where users can add blocks of notes on the photos themselves for others to see.
• Eyespot: Neat site where users can actually create video mixes online and share them with others. You can add up to 100 clips or photos to a movie as well as add transition effects and video effects. Reminds me of videos I had to create back in High School for Graphic Communications class. More on Eyespot.

That about does it for part one of the series. If there are any services that you feel should be on this list, please comment and let us know about them! If you are interested in more services in any of the above categories, feel free to contact me as I have only mentioned ones that I personally felt were best for educational use. Also, I just want to make a last note that red arrows throughout the article indicate personal favorites of mine but do not mean they are the best options for you. I recommend looking at a category that you need improvement on and find what product will best fit your needs, then go from there. Hang tight for part two of the series and enjoy!

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Article originally published on Solution Watch by Brian Benzinger © 2006

Free Science And Video Lectures Online

It's rare that I spend time reading other people's blogs.  But I've spent hours reading through the collections that this blogger has put together.
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/  I have to say that this has to be one of the greatest resources in e-learning.  Watching how other teachers, master teachers often from MIT, Stanford, or Harvard, teach hard science subjects teaches us a lot about how to reach students and get them to understand hard and difficult subjects.  We can then apply those lessons to our own projects. 

For instance, I've notice that the professors I prefer use a lot of Socratic dialogue with their students, posing questions engaging the class with their responses.  Those are the kinds of questions best used in the middle of an online presentation, to offer to a link to the discussion boards.  Technologically speaking, that can get a bit difficult to create for multiple LMS (Damn those pesky LMS issues) but for individual courses it's quite easy to break the rhythm of a boring presentation with prompts and discussions.

e-learning news

Here are some of the stories in news that I've been following:

Bloomsbury Consortium Turns to Blackboard to Host e-Learning ...
TechWhack - New Delhi,Delhi,India ... Blackboard. Blackboard is a leading supplier of enterprise e-learning solutions for colleges, universities and schools around the world. ...

UCC Fever in e-learning
Etnews - Seoul,South Korea The fever of user created contents(UCC) is growing in the e-learning industry. In the middle of growing popularity of UCC as a new ...

e-Learning Booms in Korea
Korea Times - South Korea A series of international conferences and events for e-Learning is currently taking place in Korea. The Asia-Europe Foundation, Korea ...

press1.de/eureleA 2007 - new contest - new e-learning projects ...
FinanzNachrichten.de - Germany Since the 15th of June, 2006, participants can take part in the e-learning contest for 2007. Submit your entry at www.eurelea.org. ...

Atlantic Link Short-listed for E-learning Awards
Training Press Releases (press release) - UK 21-Sep-2006 » Training Press Releases » Atlantic Link have been short-listed for two awards at the prestigious e-learning awards presented by e-learning age ...

InfoMentis Delivers Ongoing Value with e-Learning Reinforcement ...
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA 20, 2006--Today InfoMentis announced the launch of its newest product offering, Inforce, an e-learning based product suite focused on helping professionals ...

Intellego says wins contract to provide e-learning to Travelex
Life Style Extra - UK LONDON (AFX) - Intellego Holdings, the AIM-listed training and support services firm, said it has signed a contract to provide foreign exchange company ...

InfoMentis Delivers Ongoing Value with e-Learning Reinforcement
TechLINKS (press release) - Atlanta,GA,USA Today InfoMentis announced the launch of it’s newest product offering Inforce, an e-learning based product suite focused on helping professionals from client ...

Now Create SCORM and ADA E-learning Flash Presentations for LMS ...
The Open Press (press release) - USA ... E-learning presentations can be saved in SCORM and ADA compliant Flash format. This is particularly useful for instructors and presenters ...

e-learning news

e-learning benefits from ASB Trust
Scoop.co.nz (press release) - New Zealand
An e-learning centre at the northernmost primary school in New Zealand is the latest hi-tech Northland project to gain a grant from the ASB Community Trust. ...

Students to gain from e-learning project
The Brunei Times - Bandar,Brunei,Brunei Darussalam
The commitment of the Government to keep up with the latest educational methods was demonstrated yesterday with the signing of e-learning courseware project ...

Cusat to develop e-learning-based curriculum for B.Tech. students
Hindu - Chennai,India
... the emerging opportunities in engineering education, the Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) plans to develop an e-learning-based curriculum to ...

E-learning firm ThirdForce increases losses after investments
Irish Examiner - Cork,Ireland
E-learning company ThirdForce has doubled its losses from €456,000 for the first six months of last year to €1m in the same period this year. ...

CUSAT to prepare e-learning module for B-Tech students
Hindu - Chennai,India
15 (PTI): The Cochin University of Science and Technology will prepare an e-learning module for B.Tech students from this year to help them enhance their basic ...

Contract signing for developing E-Learning courseware
Bru Direct - Brunei Darussalam
... Aimed to create a set of courses of instruction by embracing the educational use of digital technology, the E-Learning Courseware is an innovative development ...

Batelco's first 'Supported e-Learning Course' successfully ...
AME Info - United Arab Emirates
Batelco Training Centre is delighted to announce that 21 participants have successfully completed the first Supported e-Learning Course in Time Management, as ...

Adobe Releases Captivate 2 For E-Learning
CXOToday.com - Mumbai,India
... The software's content can be deployed and integrated with other e-learning solutions that include Breeze, Authorware, Questionmark Perception, and SCORM/ AICC ...

Adval appoints adminitrators as e-learning ops sale falls through
Life Style Extra - UK
LONDON (AFX) - AdVal Group PLC said it cannot continue to trade and has appointed administrators after the sale of its bespoke e-learning business fell through ...

E-learning for foundation doctors launched
E-Health Insider - London,UK
... Dr Haire said that e-learning provides an added boost to practical and observational work the foundation doctors do in their training scheme, which will help ...

Contract signing for developing E-Learning courseware
Borneo Bulletin - borneo,Brunei Darussalam
The Brunei E-Learning Courseware paves the way towards a revolution in teaching and learning processes and environment by integrating and combining various ...

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Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative (OLI)

I've recently been reviewing Carnegie Mellon's OLI. It has some interesting models of instruction. The first thing I noticed is it's free, or that there is an open version of it. Apparently, "the Open & Free Version of the online course does NOT include
access to the end-of-module graded exams or to the course instructor.
No credit is awarded for completing the Open & Free Version of
the course." While the paid version, is:

Academic Version

The
Academic Version
is offered through educational institutions for credit awarded by the
student's home institution. Students in the Academic Version have
access to the same course material as the students in the Open &
Free Version PLUS access to the graded exams. The Academic Version
tracks student learning of key concepts and gives the student and the
instructor formative feedback to improve learning outcomes.

What's very interesting, besides the business model it it comes with a tutor. Here is a video describing the phyiscs tutor and the courseware.
I likethat they've tried to reduce the amount of interaction between the learner and the instructor, such that it can be learned without an instructor. But with the instructor, a learner get's more individualized learning from a human who can view the results with the tutor.

Classic Instructional Designer Links

Wikipedia's Entry on Instructional Design

A Wikipedia entry on instructional design includes information on the history of ID, influential researchers and theorists, instructional design models, and various other resources.

ASTD

Website of the American Society for Training and Development

Learning Circuits

ASTD's e-Learning online magazine

Tips for Rapid Instructional Design

Some tips, tricks, and techniques for rapid instructional design.

Training Supersite

A resource for training professionals with information on research, materials, education and employment.

Instructional Designers Forum

Forum for individuals to discuss instructional design.

Glossary of Instructional Strategies

Design and planning resource for classroom teachers, instructional designers, and professors of education. The glossary lists, describes, and provides links for over 600 educational strategies, theories, and activities.

Enrichment Games and Instructional Design

Essay by Robert Nagle that attempts to justify the use of computer games for instructional purposes.

Tools for Automating Instructional Design

Provides full-text access to the ERIC Digest of this name dealing with resources for automating the instructional design process.

Knowledge Management in Instructional Design

Provides full-text access to the ERIC Digest of this name dealing with how knowledge management can aid instructional design.

STC Special Interest Group - Instructional Design and Learning

Group's mission is to identify and develop knowledge and practical skills for designing, developing, and implementing technical instruction in electronic and traditional classroom settings. Mail list, resource links.

The ADDIE Model

The Simplest ID Model

Analyze: Needs assessment-- What are the learners' need? Define who is the audience?
Design: Create learning objectives and plot an instructional approach.
Develop: Build materials
Implement: Deliver and Distribute materials
Evaluate: And a question: Did the materials achieve the desired learning objectives?


Technorati Tags: education learning instructional design

Getting an Education Online for Free

Getting an Education Online for Free

This article will teach you how to get a top notch education for free online. Ctrl+Click any link to open it in a new window.

1. Berkeley Webcasts

Berkeley
University records many of its lectures by mp3 and real media video.
Berkeley is known for being an outstanding school, especially in
computer science. It is ranked nationally as 20th best
by usnews.com in a 2006 study of the best colleges. You can pause the
videos and mp3s, take notes, research, and press play again at your
convenience. The Berkeley webcast is the number one resource because it
lets you be in the classroom with the students watching some amazing
teachers and accomplished professionals.

URL: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/feeds.php

Why More People Don't Know

Many people leave the official Berkeley webcasts
page because it links the courses in RSS format. Those who can't follow
the rss tags, or don't know what the heck rss is, won't get to the
downloadable videos and mp3s. For those people, I list here all the
berkeley courses.

List of Free Berkeley Courses

Amercian Cyberculture General Biology Structural Biomaterials ^ Discussion Intro to Chemistry Operating Systems Programming Structures Data Structures Machine Structures Microeconomics Digital Image Processing Solid State Devices Analogue Circuits Digital Circuits Microelectronic Circuits

Geology & US Culture Wildlife Ecology Natural Resources European Civ. History US Foreign Policy 9/11 Animal Behavior Intro to Computers Intro to Human Nutrition Existentialism Film/Literature Intro to Physics + Intro to Physics 1 Intro to Physics 2 Political Science Clinical Psychology General Astronomy

Berkeley Webcast Recommendations

I recommend downloading media player classic with the Real Alternative
plugin. Media Player Classic is a quality freeware program on
sourceforge that works on both linux and windows. Real Player is
bulkware and can be really annoying, add itself to the windows startup
and opening slowly.

Despite the first lecture almost always being
an introduction, watch it anyway. It usually gives the course website
somewhere in there where you can download the lectures and assignments.

2. MIT Open Courseware

Despite having a lot of people who have donated a whole lot of money to help MIT OpenCourseware,
I don't see it as being all that much better than the Berkeley
webcasts. The benefit of going to such top notch schools, in this case
MIT is rated rated 7th nationally by usnews.com,
is being taught by masters of the field, not being on a "University
Book Club". The only benefit given on MIT open courseware is the
lecture notes, written by some unnamed MIT student and the assignments
and exams written by the professors. Otherwise, you're just simply
sharing the same reading and homework assignments as MIT students from
the required book. It gives a lot of fluff about the syllabus,
calender, reading and assignments, but again, nothing more than telling
you to read the book and do the assignments.

There's also a
discussion group for each course, but I've rarely seen much activity in
them. To be fair, I saw some video lectures somewhere in the
architecture page but after looking through about 25 courses I can't
find it again, and its safe to say most courses don't have video
lectures.

URL: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm

3. Aquiring Books

Many of these courses require books in order to follow the course as
if you were a student of the school. I've been trying to go through the
Machine Structures
course in the Berkeley webcasts, and decided to get the books required.
Computer Organization And Design - The Hardware-Software Interface was
$2 used on amazon.com, and the other required book, Ansi C Programming
Language 2nd Ed By Brian W Kernighan And Dennis M Ritchie, I got at
used books store for 10$.

Peer to Peer Networks

Some books are out of copyright and available for download as an
ebook. Be sure and check to see the status of the copyright before you
try the peer 2 peer networks because many books may be pirated. An easy
way to do this is to search the book on Google Book Search and see if full view is enabled. I highly recommend Emule and Frostwire.

Some
books cannot be found on the peer to peer networks. The amount of books
that are associated with the MIT and Berkeley courses is still high
enough to make it worth searching for. Use the document option, and
arrange by availability for best results.

4. Barnes and Nobles University

Buy the book and take the course online. Seems pretty simple. The
course aren't archived so it's limited to what's open at the moment.
You also have to enroll ahead of time.

http://university.barnesandnoble.com/browse.asp?z=y

5. Power of Forums

Forums are very useful when you find them very specific to what
you're trying to learn. People often associate forums with terrible
spelling and lost sheep fascinated with flaming misspelled obsenities
and competing to see who got the highest IQ on their tickle.com test.
There are Math Forums and even Grammar Forums where typing "omg teh monkay roxxors" is punishable by death. To find forums just search google, for example for calculus forums.
Scrolling to the bottom of a wikipedia entry of any topic will usually
give quality external links. If you're confused, you're probably not
the first. Search for your question on Google Answers and Answers.com. If it's something complex and technical, search for the title of the chapter you're currently in to get examples. Yahoo Answers is more of a lame duck, but if you search long enough you can usually find someone who answers your question seriously. See my custom Yahoo Answers page for more sites like Yahoo Answers. Always use the search feature first!

Sparknotes has a lot of forums too and I highely recommend it. Here's a list of message boards from sparknotes.

1. English
2. History
3. Math and Science
4. Other

6. Wikipedia

Many people don't know that wikipedia has a desk reference area in which people can ask questions. Wikipedia also has a spoken articles page which has many wikipedia articles in .ogg downloadable audio format. Wikipedia also has a Wikibooks section that will teach anything from Organic Chemistry to the french language.
Like the spoken articles solution, wikibooks also offers high quality
pdf downloads if you don't like reading from your computer which you
can quickly view in Foxit Reader. Don't use the bulky adobe PDF, it's horridly slow.

Misc Educational Resources

These are great reference sites to accompany wikipedia for your research.

1. Citeseer
2. Google Scholar
3. Infomine
4. Questia
5. Berkeley Engineers

7. Learning Languages

Learning languages can be great fun because you can watch TV online in the language of your choice and legally play old consol RPGs with translations. Google Toolbar
has a multilingual spell check feature if you're not strong on your
writing. Yahoo Chat in the Yahoo Messenger program has chat categories
arranged by religion, and by language. Check out the top sites on the
internet for your language in Alexa.com's top lists. Read their news stories and chat in their forums. If there are words you don't understand use babelfish
to give a rough translation. Remember that there's people interested in
practicing English too, so they can be patient and correct you if you
do the same. I was interested particularly in french so if you're also
interested, see my Learn French online section.

8. Firefox: Quick Search Video Tutorial

Watch this video to see the power of the firefox quick search and
how to make your own custom searches. Increasing the speed at which you
can access resources can in the long term save hours of time.

Drag and Drop Quick Searches

1. Click Ctrl+B
2. Open the Quick Search Folder
3. Drag and drop these links into that folder.
4. Right click the new links and click properties
5. Add a keyword

Drag
and drop these selected links right below into your quick searches
folder in firefox, and just input a keyword as shown in the video.

• Citeseer
• MIT Video
• Youtube
• Google Video
• Archive.org
• Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Futef
• Yahoo Answers
• Google Answers
• PHP documentation

Quick Search Feature Tutorial

If you open the firefox bookmarks tab (click ctrl+B), there's a
folder called quick search. For example, I type the phrase "w mad cow
disease" and it will automatically give me the wikipedia entry for mad
cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

Step by Step to Adding a Quick Search

1. Find a site you search often
2. Do a search for any keword
3. Copy the URL address after clicking search
4. Click Ctrl+B to open the bookmarks panel
5. Open the "Quick Searches" folder.
6. Right Click and Add a new book mark
7. Paste the URL address into the locations box
8. Replace the keyword you searched with %s
9. Add a keyword (like w for wikipedia)

Thank
goodness for internet video sites, which make following those
instructions a lot easier. Here's a picture example of google finance.

Remember
you can do this with any site you use often, be it myspace, digg, or
newscientist. Quick search can save about 3 or 4 clicks per search,
which can add up to a lot of time. For example, searching "cats" on
youtube. With a quicksearch you just type "y cats" in the address bar.
Without the quick search you have to type youtube.com in the address
bar, type cats in the search, order by views. Too much effort!!! XD

Answers.com Extension

Answers.com has a great extension that lets you research a word just by alt clicking it.

9. Freeware Applications

There are tons of freeware that will help you study and become more efficient. Sourceforge and the free software foundation have tons of freeware on education. For example, a useful Mind Mapping program for those complicated essays, a quiz creator and a hyper advanced flash card maker. Maybe a simple flash card maker or a web based quiz creator? How about a macro
to automatically perform common tasks like typing urls and inputting
dates. Macros are extremely useful for the 1% of computer users that
learns to use them, but they can also be a little too complex for beginners to learn.

10. Misc Video Resources

MIT has a whole lot of video lectures, but most are related to very current events and likely won't gain people better marks on traditional tests. PBS fontline has a pretty large archive of awesome documentaries. Check out our Google Hidden Categories
post about all 38 categories on Google Video, most of which Google
doesn't list anywhere on their site. We can use the hidden queries to
search for Educational Lectures.
Google video has a bunch of college lectures in it, just do a search
for the subject you want to learn about, then try adding lecture. Also
search your favorite college like MIT. How Stuff Works has a few google videos as well. Archive.org also has its own section about educational videos.

Internet to Replace Colleges?

There are already many online universities, but I hope for something free and accessible by anyone. Most online universities are ripoffs owned by stock holding companies. They want to maxamize profits while spending the minimal on education. Sites like AIU university
have their own team of aggressive telemarketers they have the nerve to
call "counselors" which work to excite the students into thinking
they're prime candidates for the university.

With high speed
connection users increasing and streaming video downloads becoming more
and more popular, it's very likely that internet based streams and
video collections will one day compete with traditional schools. Video
competition will eventually lead to more and more efficient and fun
ways of learning things. For example many instant messenger programs
like MSN and Yahoo! have white board options that people could use
already for Math. You can even use an Ajax Whiteboard
and invite a friend using only your browser. A whiteboard in
combination with a voice messenger like skype and yahoo is an
invaluable tutor resource. A search for Education and self learning on google brings up more sites than I can bookmark.

So
maybe you won't get the little paper saying you graduated from that
University, but is that really the point of college? I anticipate and
immidiate grown of "...yes...sfld", but in any case, if you write your
notes down and show you've participated in the online courses the
classes will be a breeze and the colleges are more likely to accept you
when you show them you're hard work, and how you've been able to apply
it. Impress them with your talk about current issues from the MIT
videos, and your contributions to helping others in wikipedia help desk
after you studied the subjects.

How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team

by Shane Diffily

• Published in: Business |
• 
  
  

  Discuss this article »

It can be tricky to identify the right levels of manpower
for a web team. Indeed, many organisations badly underestimate the
amount of work required to keep their sites operating smoothly—they
perhaps imagine that once a website is put live, it magically looks
after itself. As a result, only the barest bones of proper staffing are
put in place.

Fortunately, the problem of defining the number
of people required on a web team is not insurmountable. A useful device
for arriving at a good answer is the concept of “website scale.”

Step onto the scales

Website scale is a means of describing a site in terms of three parameters:

• size
• complexity
• level of activity

Almost
any online venture can be represented in this way—from a small intranet
to a massive e-commerce site. The reason website scale is so useful is
that it provides a practical means for estimating the number of people
needed to carry out the activities of site maintenance. This includes
content publishing, feedback monitoring, technical maintenance and
general quality assurance.

For example, consider the websites of the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Icelandic TV channel, Ríkisútvarpið RUV. Even a cursory review will show that the BBC site is far greater in scale than that of its Icelandic equivalent.

That
is, www.bbc.co.uk has more pages, uses a wider variety of more complex
technologies, and receives substantially more traffic than www.ruv.is.
It can therefore be concluded that a greater number of people are
required to support it. The actual amount can be gauged by examining
each of the elements of website scale.

Why size matters

In simple terms, the bigger a website is, the more people are needed to maintain it.

Yet,
how can the “size” of a site be measured? Is it simply a total of all
the megabytes of data it contains? Or, perhaps a count of the number of
pages it has online?

In fact, neither of these is
satisfactory. A website could contain hundreds of megabytes in just a
few video files. Another might host thousands of pages, but each might
consist of only a few words.

As a consequence, the best way
of calculating website size is the total number of man-hours required
to produce and maintain all of that site’s content. This can then be
used to estimate the number of people required for support,
particularly in the areas of content publishing and quality assurance.

Calculating man-hours

For
instance, it may take 3 hours to create and publish a 500 word feature
for an intranet; information about medical benefits, for example. This
content would then be scheduled for review every six months (to ensure
it remains accurate), at a cost of 30 minutes per review. Therefore, an
intranet of this type requires 3.5 man-hours to produce and maintain a
500-word article.

If 100 new features of this type are
planned, 350 man-hours (eight and a half weeks) are needed for
production and review. Given that the average number of man-hours
available per person per year is about 1,750, we can now see how
staffing is calculated.

For example, the content described
above could be maintained by a single person over the course of a year,
with plenty of time to spare: 1,750–350 = 1,400.

Although
this math is fairly straightforward, recommending precise levels of
employment is more complicated because of the ways in which websites
differ from one another. For example, a site that contains a lot of
video or highly technical content may need far more time for production
than one that holds simple generic text.

The general rule is
that any site containing a lot of frequently changing features will
need far more staff than one with only a few, static pages. The
following table shows indicative staffing levels for the three most
common grades of website size.

Figure 1. The three grades of website size

Website size	Man-hours	Staffing level
Small	1,500–4,000	About 1–2 people
Medium	4,000–10,000	About 2–4 people
Large	10,000+	From 5 people upwards

Complexity by progression

Differences in
manpower can also arise as a result of the technology used to develop a
site. This is because intricate websites usually require several people
in the area of technical maintenance. In this way, we can say that
there are three levels of site complexity.

Basic

Often
referred to as “brochureware,” this is the most straightforward type of
website. Such sites merely contain information in plain text
(HTML/XHTML) hosted on a webserver, with perhaps a few supporting
images and downloads. The uncomplicated nature of such sites means they
are relatively easy to maintain. A single person with low-level skills
may often be enough.

Dynamic

On a dynamic
website, content is stored in a database and published according to the
requirements of site visitors. Such sites are frequently used by
businesses that publish large volumes of information in a standard way,
e.g. news organisations. However, (within the terms of the definition
used here) it should be noted that a Dynamic site does not allow
transactions, i.e. there is no ability to “log on” or to “buy.”

Although
the user experience of a dynamic website is similar to that of a Basic
site, the technology that underlies it is much more involved. As such,
a team of two or three people with good technical skills may be needed
for a medium-sized entity of this type.

Transactional

A
transactional website is one that uses the internet to host
applications in support of business operations or revenue generation.
Indeed, some of the world’s best known sites use this as a model for
their operations, e.g. Dell.com.

Not
all such sites are vehicles for the exchange of money. For example,
many corporate intranets can be considered transactional because of the
interactive features they contain: timesheets, expense submission, etc.
The variety of technology used in transactional sites (application
servers, security systems, etc.) means that a team of highly qualified
staff is needed for support. Indeed, the largest and busiest sites
often employ half a dozen or more people.

Figure 2. The three levels of website complexity

Website type	Complexity	Staffing level
Basic	Plain content (HTML/XHTML)	About 1 person
Dynamic	Dynamically generated from a database	About 2–3 people (or more on a very large or busy site)
Transactional	Fully-transactional content, e.g. e-commerce	From 3 people upwards (many more on a large or busy site)

The impact of activity

Website activity is
the last and possibly most important factor for planning manpower on a
web team. Busy sites inevitably have to deal with mountains of
feedback, customer problems, and general issues of upkeep. As a result,
complexity has a very strong influence on staffing across all areas of
maintenance. It can also have the effect of rapidly multiplying the
manpower estimates recommended by website size or complexity.

Two
common means for measuring online activity are page impressions and the
number of visitors. As a general rule, a site must receive a minimum of
1,000,000 page impressions or 100,000 visitors per month to be
considered busy (although many receive far more than that).

The
result of such heavy activity means a site is unlikely to function
properly without a full complement of maintenance personnel. Indeed, a
busy site that is also large in size and transactional in nature may
need dozens of staff to keep it up and running.

Figure 3. The three levels of website activity

Level of activity	Page impressions
Quiet	0–50,000 a month
Intermediate	50,000–1,000,000 a month
Busy	1,000,000+ a month

Staffing depends on management buy-in

Many
managers simply don’t understand why some website require a substantial
maintenance staff—and this can lead to chronic understaffing.
Overcoming this attitude is among the greatest challenges to be faced
by a web team; with luck, the principles outlined in this article will
help.

Screen resolution 800 x 600 significantly decreased for exploring the internet

Screen resolution
800 x 600 significantly decreased for exploring the internet according to OneStat.com

 

Amsterdam
- June 25 - OneStat.com (
www.onestat.com
), the number one provider of real-time intelligence web analytics,
today reported that  the screen resolution 800 x 600 pixels has
signficantly decreased since July 2005. More and more internet users choose for screen resolution 1024 x 768
or higher. 

 

The finding has important implications for web site designers because most web sites are designed
for a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels.

 

The screen resolution 1024 x 768
has reached an all time high 
of 56.15 percent. 
Users with monitors set to the most common resolution 800 x 600 for
web sites have an approximate 12.04 percent global usage share. Almost
a year
ago this percentage was 18.23 percent.

 

"Our software is the ultimate solution for each webmaster to measure
screen resolutions of 
your website visitors," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of
OneStat.com.

 

The most popular screen resolutions on the web
in
the world
are: 

 

1.	1024 x 768	56.15%
2.	1280 x 1024	15.79%
3.	800 x 600	12.04%
4.	1280 x 800	4.09%
5.	1152 x 864	3.90%

 

The most popular screen resolutions

on the web in the USA
are: 

 

1.	1024 x 768	52.22%
2.	800 x 600	13.81%
3.	1280 x 1024	16.91%
4.	1280 x 800	5.05%
5.	1152 x 864	3.63%

 

 

The most popular screen resolutions on the web

in Canada
are: 

 

1.	1024 x 768	54.31%
2.	800 x 600	19.94%
3.	1280 x 1024	12.06%
4.	1280 x 800	3.93%
5.	1152 x 864	3.75%

 

 

The most popular screen resolutions on the web

in the UK
are: 

 

1.	1024 x 768	58.90%
2.	800 x 600	15.38%
3.	1280 x 1024	12.90%
4.	1280 x 800	4.07%
5.	1152 x 864	3.08%

 

 

The most popular screen resolutions on the web

in Germany
are: 

 

1.	1024 x 768	51.08%
2.	1280 x 1024	24.88%
3.	1280 x 800	5.70%
4.	800 x 600	5.48%
5.	1152 x 864	4.98%

 

 

The most popular screen resolutions on the web

in the Netherlands
are: 

 

1.	1024 x 768	57.49%
2.	1280 x 1024	18.67%
3.	800 x 600	9.75%
4.	1280 x 800	4.11%
5.	1152 x 864	3.96%

 

All
numbers are an average of the last 2 months. OneStat.com is the number one
provider of real-time website analysis software in the world. Our
superior technology powers thousands of websites in different
countries all over the world.  With our accurate, detailed & reliable reports we will be
able to answer questions about visitor behaviour, site performance and
retention. 

 

The
OneStat.com solutions provide executives, marketers and webmasters
with answers to critical e-business questions such as: 

·       

Who is visiting my web

site?

·       

How many pageviews, visits (sessions) and visitors are coming on a daily,
weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis?

·       

What content, products, and services do my visitors prefer?

·       

How many visitors return to the website and how often?

·       

What kind of search engine do they use?

·       

What kind of technology do your visitors use to view the web

site?

·       

How much time do they spent on the website?
 

OneStat.com
has the intention to become the number one and largest pan-European
provider of real-time website analysis software. The web analytics ASP
market totalled $49 million in 2000 and could be worth over $700
million in 2004, according to research agencies. 

 

Methodology:
A global usage share of xx percent for screen resolution Y means that
xx percent of the visitors of Internet users arrived at sites that are
using one of OneStat.com's services by using screen resolution Y.
All numbers mentioned in the research are averages of 
last month and
all
measurements are normalised to the GMT timezone. Research is based on
a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100
countries each day.