AV Simple Links of Interest
Here are a few links that are related to educational technologies.
To create educational content, you will need software. We prefer when possible to use software that is "Open Source" or in other words "free".
- If you would like to see a growing list of free educational technology software, you may wish to visit the Schoolforge Website
- The most comprehensive list of open source software of all kinds is found on the Sourceforge Website. At last count, they had a database of 176,124 projects.
Once you create your educational content, you may wish to load that content into an open source Learning Management Systems (LMS) so that your students may view it. There are several options for open source systems.
- Our favorite is Moodle. There are many other free LMS systems, and if you would like to shop around, here is a list of the major ones.
- A Tutor.
- OLAT - Open Source Learning and Training.
- Dokeos.
- Ilias.
- Caroline.
- Sakai.
- DotLrn.
- If money is no object, you can buy a commercial LMS from Blackboard for a few hundred thousand dollars. But before you do, compare Blackboard with Moodle and the other free systems listed above, feature by feature, and we think you will hesitate before you write out your check.
SCORM, or the Sharable Content Object Reference Model is the cutting edge of educational technology. Here are some links that will help you understand what this technology is and does, and how you can download some free software that will allow you to create and view SCORM objects.
- Here is a Wikipedia article on the SCORM Standard. This will give you a general idea of what SCORM is and how it works.
- The SCORM standard was an initiave inagurated by the United States Government. It is now supervised by the the Advanced Distributed Learning collaborative effort.
- A good tool to help you package learning objects into a SCORM compliant object is the EXE Editor which you can download for free.
- If you are developing SCORM compliant content, you may wish to make use of the RELOAD Player. This free software will allow you to play a SCORM compliant object on your computer.