Create a Quick Discussion Forum

I'm not sure how many people still use text based threaded discussion forums, but if you do, Forumotion is a pretty powerful tool with some nice features that you can use to set one up for free.

It's very quick, and you don't need any technical skills or hosting. Basically you just go to http://www.forumotion.com/, and click on 'Create a free forum'. You'll then be able to select from a range of different template designs. Once you've chosen the one you want you fill in the details of your forum and create a password. You'll then be ready to activate you forum and start using it. The best place to start in on the Administration Panel. Here you can get some tips on how to get started and how to get your forum registered with search engines etc. If you want to see what a forum can look like and try it out, there's one here which I created as an example. https://peacheypublications.forumotion.com/  

 Forumotion has some nice features and is pretty simple. There is also a newsletter function so that you can send messages to all the members of your forum. This is a handy tool if you are teaching distance classes, or would just like to set up some simple online discussion topics for your students. It also looks like they are taking their responsibilities seriously regarding e-safety too, though you should still read the terms of use, as there is some sharing with third parties of non-personal information.  

Hope you find this useful.  

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Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd

 

 

 

Free ebooks on elearning

There's a really impressive collection of free ebooks on the eLearning Guild website.

The latest one is Tips for Producing and Managing Flash-based e-Learning Content. In all there are eight ebooks there dating back to 2005 and they are all free to download.

Each book is a collection of tips and they cover topics from choosing the best LMS (learning management system) to tips on beingg an online trainer.

These all look well worth a read.

Best

Nik

Real time collaboration

I've just spotted this really nice real time collaboration tool called Twiddla. It's a free tool which doesn't involve any downloading or installing any software.

It allows real time collaboration through voice, or text chat and has a shared white board space which all users can annotate, drag pictures or text onto etc.

You can browse through websites upload documents and images to work on collaboratively or just use a blank background as a white board space to write or draw on.

There's a live sandbox so you can go in and try the real thing without registering.
If you do register you can then have either a public space or a private space that you invite selective people along to.

• Try it here

This looks really ideal for delivering synchronous distance learning sessions.

Hope you find it useful

Nik

Build your own Facebook Apps

App in a box is a really interesting site that claims to be able to help you build your own Facebook applications within 5 minutes.



The site offers to help you build 5 different types of applications at the moment. These are:

• Text
• Mp3
• Video
• Image
• Any combination of the above

They also have 3 new ones planned

• Link to information on other social networks
• A count down to an event
• A quiz type app

If you are keen on getting students using social networks like Facebook and want to connect that to other work you are doing without all the hassle of learning lots of programming skills, then this looks worth a try.

I haven't tried it myself yet, so I'm not sure if it does all that, but will post something ( maybe even with a tutorial on http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/ once I have.

If you try or have tried it, by all means post a comment below and let me know how you got on.

best

Nik