The following technology tools help students collaborate and publish in new ways. The basic theory is that students need to write to a real audience. With current technologies, students can do this without the hardship of difficult training. Just turn the students loose on the tools and have them develop and present a meaningful project.
Lulu – www.lulu.com
1. Lulu is FREE, FAST and EASY
No set-up fees. No minimum order. No delay. No catch. Lulu prints and ships each book as it's bought. The buyer pays the cost — not you. Lulu only makes money if you do.
2. You're in control
You retain all rights to your work. You decide on design and layout. You set the price and royalties. Lulu's not the publisher — you are.
3. Sell to the world
Lulu lets you sell your work through Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble — and on Lulu itself. Lulu handles all transactions, order tracking and shipping.
Drupals - http://drupal.org/
Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites, including
• community web portals and discussion sites
• corporate web sites/intranet portals
• personal web sites
• aficionado sites
• e-commerce applications
• resource directories
Drupal includes features to enable
• content management systems
• blogs
• collaborative authoring environments
• forums
• newsletters
• picture galleries
• file uploads and download
and much more.
Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free.
Podcasts - http://audioblogger.com (free)
"Podcasting" is making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user's convenience.” Make it easy on yourself with http://www.libsyn.com ($5 a month).
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Wikis – http://www.wikispaces.org/
Wiki is a free piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.
Camtasia Studio 2 – www.techsmith.com
Have students create training, demos and tutorials.
With Camtasia Studio, you can:
• Answer questions with screen recordings explaining how to use software and Web sites.
• Post PowerPoint presentations on the Web, complete with Picture-in-Picture, for virtual learning.
• Demonstrate features, new versions of software, Web sites and other applications.
• Rollout online training to the entire company and let them learn at their own pace.
