education

Visual aid designer

SMART Ideas Concept-Mapping Software offers a surprisingly simple way to create elaborate visual aids. With simple commands and quick results, anyone from teachers to business people will find this useful.

The program's interface may require a trip to the Help file for rookies, but it won't be long before they are working on their own. With simple command icons, an intuitive layout, and fantastic design templates, users will soon feel very comfortable here. The best place to start designing is within a template. The program provides dozens of choices from business-, science-, and productivity-themed pages to create diagrams. … Read more

BOL 1033: Special interview with federal CTO Aneesh Chopra

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra drops by to chat with us about the technology policies of the current U.S. administration. We ask him our own questions as well as some from the audience. Get Chopra's takes on Broadband, health care, Net neutrality, education, and more.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1033

The following is a rundown of the topics covered in this comprehensive interview and the questions asked by the hosts as well as some questions submitted by fans of Buzz Out Loud. Thanks for your participation, … Read more

Easy Spanish tutor

Learn Spanish with this simple program aimed at helping users develop speaking skills from the ground up. With easy controls and a few surprises, this is a great tutor for those getting into this beautiful language.

The program's interface will be a blessing to computer users of all skill levels. With simple icons that do a good job of describing their function, users need only hold the cursor over each for a more in-depth description to pop up. A Help file is also available, which focuses on program functions and not Spanish language. Users begin by choosing what level … Read more

Survey: Best buys in online business colleges

With online education growing more popular, a recent survey has ranked the most affordable online business colleges.

Coming in No. 1 as most affordable was East Carolina University in North Carolina, according to the survey released Wednesday by GetEducated.com. Residents of the state can pay $11,880 for an online bachelor's degree in business, though out-of-state students pay a less modest $54,480 for the same degree.

The University of Wyoming came in second with its bachelor's in business administration program costing $16,080 for all online students, in or out of state.

GetEducated.com graded online … Read more

Educators take Web 2.0 to school

I spent part of last week in Washington, D.C., at the annual National Educational Computing Conference. The event, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, is sponsored by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

As you'd expect, there were plenty of workshops on the nuts and bolts of using technology in the classroom. But as technology evolves, so does the way it's used by some creative educators.

There were several sessions, for example, on how to use cell phones within the classroom. Considering that some school districts still ban students from bringing cell phones to … Read more

Maine: A MacBook for each student in grades 7-12

Maine is extending an existing Apple notebook purchase program to high-school students.

Apple has been working with the state since 2002 to provide middle school students with notebook computers. With the expansion, Maine becomes the only U.S. state that has committed to providing a notebook to every public-school student from 7th to 12th grade.

To fulfill its commitment, the Maine Department of Education has ordered more than 64,000 MacBooks for students and faculty, with an additional 7,000 that will be ordered in the coming weeks.

Maine Education Commissioner Sue Gendron said the state has seen benefits in … Read more

DukeMobile iPhone app puts historical images in your pocket

Here's an interesting tidbit for students, scholars, historians, and folks who like purty pictures: DukeMobile, an app ostensibly designed for students of Duke University, just added a collection of nearly 32,000 historical images, all of them specially formatted for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I could blather on about it (and, truly, I do love to blather), but I think you're better off watching this impressive demo video:

The images come from 20 collections that cover topics like women's history, early American sheet music, and vintage advertisements. Duke will add new collections regularly as they become … Read more

Open source will never do that...

Years ago I proclaimed open source would never be relevant in the application market. Now I work for an open-source applications company.

Lesson? It's generally not a good idea to underestimate open source's potency.

To wit, here are three "Who would have thought open source could do that?" announcements that recently hit my RSS reader:

NovusEdge is demoing open-source energy management for "massive commercial buildings." OpenRemote does open-source home automation, but this suggests the idea can take on a different scale. Human resource professionals spend time and money tracking job applicants. Well, now they … Read more

Old-school word nerds meet the digital age

Now here's one you don't see every day: Wordnik, which launched out of private beta on Monday and states its mission as "discovering all the words and everything about them." Taking the basic premise of a dictionary, Wordnik supplements each entry with Web 2.0's tastiest treats--relevant Flickr images, Twitter search matches, user-contributed tags and comments--and then invites users to add their own words, too.

Calling itself a "project" rather than a company, Wordnik's origins are sort of like a dot-com fairy tale. CEO Erin McKean, then serving as editor-in-chief of Oxford … Read more