Access here means the ability to retrieve, read, view, input, and/or edit a system/content.

iPhone.  An internet-connected multimedia smart phone. It is a phone, an iPod, an Internet device, and a GPS. 

Google voice search on the iPhone.  This application enables users to use iPhone’s built-in sensors, not just voice recognition, but also gesture recognition.  The application starts listening when you put the phone to your face.

PBworks (formerly PBwiki). A hosted wiki application (meaning it runs on their own servers and users don't have to install anything on their own web sites). It has many of the most popular features found on modern wiki sites, including change notification via email or RSS, reversing changes, auditing, collaborative page editing, etc.

 

PBworks for academic use.  Also, education-specific resources: Educational examples

 

Second life.  An online virtual world. Residents of Second Life interact with each other through avatars. There are many educational uses of Second Life.  Second Life caters to users over 18, while its sister site Teen Second Life is restricted to users 13-18. Below are two related links to Second Life:


Global Kids' Groundbreaking Second Life Curriculum Featured At Virtual Worlds Conference in Los Angeles


Harvard’s Virtual education experiment in Second Life

Zoho or Zoho Office Suite. A web-based office suite which includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, note-taking, wikis, document sharing and other applications. Since it is web-based, Zoho applications are independent of your operating system.

Zoho can read and write file formats used in MS Office, OpenOffice, and other systems. The programs in the suite can be used individually but offer additional integration benefits when used together. The data or document files can be saved on Zoho's servers.

 

Audacity is an open source audio editor that’s very easy for the basic stuff (which is mostly what most people do) and sophisticated enough if a user needs more.
A user can easily record audio directly in the rapid elearning tools. When working on a big project, the user can also break her/his production up into chunks and keep her/his audio separate.
The user can also easily layer her/his narration with ambient sound or different effects with Audacity. When it is done , simply import it into one’s rapid elearning course.
Tutorial on Audacity

 

K-12 FlexBook (beta version) composed of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts that serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning. The key features include:



• Access to free textbooks
• High quality educational content created by educators
• Content customized to reflect "today" and the different needs of students
• Quality ensured by CK-12's Community of Educational Practitioners
• Increased pedagogic choice for all teachers, aligned to state standards as well as developmentally correct content
• Supported by publishing tools that facilitate quick and easy content creation and distribution
• Collaborative learning via a community where authors, teachers, and students create, access, share, rate, recommend, and publish.

 

eLesson Markep Language Editor is an open source XML framework for creating structured eLessons using XML. University of Zurich built eLML Editor which was based on based on the Mozilla Firefox Plugin technology. You may download eLML.

 

Format Factory enables its users to convert media from one format to another. It’s a handy tool for those who need to convert media from one format to another, for example, converting a clip to the SWF and FLV Flash formats.

 

Google Analytics helps users find out where learners log into a designate course, when the learners log in, what course components/sections pulled the most responses, and how the learners interact. All these help you create high-converting course sites.

 

Google Docs allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users, and presenting them as needed. Mobile phone users can browse their Google Docs documents in a mobile browser. Users can view (but not edit) documents and spreadsheets, but not presentations or PDF files.

A version of Google Docs for the iPhone includes functionality for editing spreadsheets and viewing presentations, along with an interface designed specifically for the device.

 

Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether they be online or in libraries. Its "group of" feature provides the various available links to the journal article. Its "cited by" feature provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed. It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Its "Related articles" feature presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of each paper.

 

Google Voice Google is spotting a weakness in the marketing and attacking it. "Skype still doesn't record! and conference calling is not reliable because Skype wants to use so much bandwidth.... Elluminate works on low bandwidth, but has never been very easy to use.... Flash Meeting, Dim Dim, Adobe Connect all use the Flash player to web conference, and while that makes it potentially user friendly, it also makes it bandwidth hungry." Well, let's see if they can solve this problem - it would make the web a lot more interesting.

 

OpenSimulator, or OpenSim, is an open source server for hosting virtual worlds similar to Second Life. OpenSim may be used for creating custom avatars, chatting with others in the environment, building 3D content in world, and creating complex 3D applications in world.

 

Photo Resizer is a tool for quick resizing of images. All one does is drag the image (or folder of images) one wants resized onto the icon. Then they get resized to whatever the number is on the application title. If one wants a new size, just change the number.

 

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software that does most of what one expects from a graphics editor. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. There is a growing number of people using this software with friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

 

Pixie is a color picker, a tool for working with colors. When you run Pixie, it points to a color and tells you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. These values can then be used to reproduce the selected color in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current coordinates of your mouse pointer.

 

PiexlFish or Eyespot http://eyespot.com/, as it was called, offers an all-in-one solution for hosting, mixing and sharing your video on the Internet and over mobile devices. Anyone can use the site to watch video and share via links and email. Registered users can Upload, Mix and Remix, add effects, share via Mobile device, create groups, create a video blog, etc.

 

Sketchcast is a new way to communicate something online by recording a sketch, optionally with your voice speaking. Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel here (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed).

• Animoto.  A site that let's you upload photos that get turned into "videos".

•  

• Blogger.  Free blog site.  Create blogs easily.

•  

• Browsershots.  A free online service that lets you see what your web site looks like in different web browsers.  Load a URL and get back screen shots of your web site in dozens of different browsers.

•  

• Buzzword.  Like Google DOCS.  Adobe has some other collaborative tools as well.

•  

• Del.icio.us.   Social bookmarking web site.

•  

• Flickr.  Online photo sharing site.  Includes simple photo editing capabilities. 

•  

• Google Maps.  Straightforward site.  US maps, including satellite imagery.

•  

• Google Reader.  Online way to organize favorite web sites and blogs.

•  

• Ning.  Social networking site.

•  

• QR Codes.  No specific web site.  Type QR codes and mobile learning in Google for instance.  This is a cool up and coming technology.  Basically, bar code reading with a cell phone, etc.

•  

• Readability.  Determine how readable your web site is.  Like Browsershots, you submit a URL and get feedback.

•  

• RefWorks.  An online citation manager.  Subscribers can store reference database online, allowing them to use and update it from anywhere, and to share data with other subscribers.

•  

• Scrapblog.  Create online multimedia scrap books. 

•  

• Skype.  Simple, and free phone and video-conferencing over the web.

•  

• Slideshare.  A free service for web sharing presentations, slideshows, Word documents and PDFs.

•  

• Smart Pen.  Record your handwritten notes as images or even video, with a pen. Record corresponding audio as well!

•  

• Usability.  An instructional design oriented tool.  This government web site will help you determine usability of your web content. 

•  

• WAVE.  A free web accessibility evaluation tool sponsored by WebAIM. Determine how accessible your web site is.

•  

• Web 2.0 in a nutshell.  A wonderful resource and list of We 2.0 tools.  Hosted by Internet4Classrooms

•  

• Wikispaces.  Free wiki site.  Create wikis for classes and more.

•  

• Wordpress.  Online blog and publishing platform.

•  

• YouTube EDU.  An educationally oriented version of YouTube.  

•  

• YouTube Downloader.  Download YouTube videos and covert them to other formats.

 

• Biometrics (adapted from SearchSecurity.com and Wiki)

• Biometrics refers to methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits. In information technology, in particular, biometrics is used as a form of identity access management and access control. It is comprised of the technologies that measure and analyze human body characteristics, such as fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, voice patterns, facial patterns and hand measurements, for authenticcation purposes. Biometrics can be a valuable Identity Access Management (IAM) tool for enterprises

•  

• Cloud computing (adapted from Wikipedia)

• Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.  Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.

•  

• The concept incorporates infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) as well as other recent (ca. 2007–2009) technology trends that have the common theme of reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. Cloud computing services usually provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

•  

• In many ways, cloud computing is simply a buzzword used to repackage grid computing and utility computing, both of which have existed for decades. Like grid computing, cloud computing requires the use of software that can divide and distribute components of a program to thousands of computers. New advances in processors, virtualization technology, disk storage, broadband Internet access and fast, inexpensive servers have all combined to make cloud computing a compelling paradigm. Cloud computing allows users and companies to pay for and use the services and storage that they need, when they need them and, as wireless broadband connection options grow, where they need them. Customers can be billed based upon server utlilization, processing power used or bandwidth consumed. As a result, cloud computing has the potential to upend the software industry entirely, as applications are purchased, licensed and run over the network instead of a user's desktop. This shift will put data centers and their administrators at the center of the distributed network, as processing power, electricity, bandwidth and storage are all managed remotely.

•  

• Google's Desktop OS It's everything. Google Checkout provides an alternative to PayPal. Street View is well on its way to taking a picture of every house on every street in the United States. Google's early-beta Chrome browser earned a 1 percent market share in the first 24 hours of its existence. Android, Google's cell phone operating system, is hitting handsets as you read this, becoming the first credible challenger to the iPhone among sophisticated customers.

•  

• Gesture-Based Remote Control
  Gesture recognition employs a camera (such as a laptop's Webcam) to watch the user and react to the person's hand signals. Holding your palm out flat would indicate "stop," for example, if you're playing a movie or a song. And waving a fist around in the air could double as a pointing system: You would just move your fist to the right to move the pointer right, and so on. Toshiba, Qosmio G55 laptop can recognize gestures to control multimedia playback.

•  

• Nehalem (Intel) and Swift (AMD) Chips

  On-die chip - putting graphic processing unit chip right on the CPU makes graphics perform far better than existing CPU and GPU installed separately. The product is predicted to be on market in 2009.

   

  USB 3.0 (aka SuperSpeed USB)
  USB 3.0 increases performance by a factor of 10, pushing the theoretical maximum throughput of the connector all the way up to 4.8 gigabits per second, or processing roughly the equivalent of an entire CD-R disc every second. USB 3.0 should also greatly enhance the power efficiency of USB devices, while increasing the juice available to them. That means faster charging times for your iPod--and probably even more bizarre USB-connected gear like the toy rocket launchers and beverage coolers that have been festooning people's desks.

   

• Windows 7
  Windows 7 operating system with an enhanced online integration and more cloud computing features--look for Microsoft to tie its growing Windows Live services into the OS more strongly than ever. Gives users a way to take all their data, desktop settings, bookmarks, and the like from one computer to another.