Create Dynamic Classroom Portals

SchoolRack enables you to set up classroom portals for your students and parents to use. There is a reasonable selection of included themes to choose from.

Each student/parent creates their own individual account. They can then search for and join their school as well as joining your class group (either manually or through a generated code).

Not only can you post assignments for students and parents to read and download, but you can also use the inbuilt discussion board, calendar, internal messaging and online assignment collection and assignment grading feature.

It is, also, very easy to include any embeddable content, such as videos and widgets, from other websites. All these  features, help to make SchoolRack a dynamic two-way learning platform, which can be used inside and outside of the classroom.

Your published site, including added files etc, is publicly visible and can be accessed by anyone who knows your website address - in the form of http://schoolrack.com/sitename

This also applies to the topics on the discussion board, which can be read by anyone although only your group members can contribute to the discussions. It is worth noting that 'password protected sites' are available for the paid version but not for the basic free version, being reviewed here.

SchoolRack is very easy to use and for those that have not gone down the Moodle route (or something similar), then SchoolRack has plenty to offer!

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The Social Learning Revolution at Scilpo

Sclipo is a newly created social network designed specifically for those in education.

Sclipo's main social learning features include:

* A Profile which connects you with people of common educational interests.

* An Academy where you teach through the use of the other educational applications.

* A Courses application which allows you to create and post your courses.

* A Library where you store, manage and share educational content in any format.

* A Live Web Class allowing you to teach up to 100 students live through webcam, whiteboard and document presentation.  Students can participate actively through audio, video and chat.

* A Live Web Meeting room for audio and chat only meetings plus upload image files.

* Facebook Connection allowing you to easily connect and publish to Facebook.

* Payments Option (premium service) enabling you to charge students for your courses and web classes -  directly through PayPal.

The Sclipo platform looks promising. For me, the strongest features include the facebook connection (including single signon), the live web class and the live web meetings. As well as this, keeping track of the courses you are following and teaching is very well set out and a good message updating system is  included.

I would, however, like to see a desktop sharing element added to the live web class to allow for live demonstration from websites. I would, also, like to see a feature in the Library enabling embedded content. With so much creative commons content already available on the Internet, it should be easier to use it without having to download and upload again.

All in all, Sclipo is well worth checking out!

Sclipo Demo
Uploaded by The Sclipo University

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An affordable and reliable VLE

Last year we were able to start using a VLE thanks to the development of open source software Moodle. Products such as Blackboard and WebCT being well out our price range. We are using version 1.6 which is proving to be very useful. The new version 1.8.2 contains a number of improvements that make the application more flexible and stable.  The only main drawback is that I cannot get the email feature to work with Google Apps. We are using the standard edition which allows us to set up Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk accounts for all our students using our own domain name.

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Technorati Tags: google apps, moodle, vle

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