Sunday, September 24, 2006

Wimba Voice Tools for Blackboard - Pilot

Wimaba Voice Tools
Give your online Class a Voice!


To join the pilot and try the Horizon Wimba Building Block for Blackboard:

  1. You will need to register the class that is going to use Wimba with me (that means just give me the course ID). I must send that information to Inez Ferrell,the Director of Instructional Technology, in Richmond.
  2. The instructor will have to give me (to send to Inez) a detailed description of its use within the class instruction (what objectives it will support) the number of students who are in the class and may make use of it
  3. Then an evaluation at the end of the course that illustrates its effectiveness from both the instructor and student point of view.

This may seem like a lot of documentation but it really is not if the students are asked to evaluate Wimba in a discussion board and the instructor can pull the information from both what the purpose of its use was with the objective and the result.


Of course all of this is to help us make a business case for purchasing Wimba on an Enterprise level.

Please call me if you want to join the pilot or have questions.

What is Wimba?
http://www.horizonwimba.com/products/voicetools/

Benefits

  • Offer live discussions between students and teachers, anytime, anywhere
  • Teach foreign languages by emphasizing speaking and listening
  • Encourage on-going discussions and debates about different subjects and ideas
  • Easily teach pronunciation, rhythm, stress, and emphasis
  • Students learn all aspects of a language through listening, speaking, and writing exercises
  • 24/7 access
  • Seamlessly integrate within Blackboard and WebCT - no new interfaces to configure or commands to learn
  • Instant anytime, anywhere access to language resources as students are no longer constrained by the availability of a physical language lab and/or instructors

Features

  • Live Conversation and/or Voice Coaching
    Practice a language by actually speaking it with someone. This real-time voice conferencing feature allows for live oral language instruction, small group role-plays, and other live, conversation-based tasks. Additionally, instructors can conduct lectures, conferences, discussions and debates, keep virtual office hours for conversations with students, and even record discussions for future playback.
  • Threaded Voice Boards
    Speak and read a language at the same time, or simply create threaded voice discussions about any subject. Great for brainstorming and collaborating on almost any topic in any language, instructors and students can post vocal messages with accompanying text into our voice-based message boards. Discuss multiple subjects at once by dividing new topics into their own threads. This is one of the best ways to practice all aspects of a new language.
  • Embedded Voice within Course Pages
    Easily add listening exercises and voice messages into any CMS course page. Our Voice Tools incorporate a small recorder and playback feature that can be placed within any CMS page allowing instructors to verbally explain complex ideas, post assignments, or simply highlight important ideas that will be discussed in upcoming lessons.
  • Voice-Enabled E-Mail
    Students and instructors can send vocal email messages to anyone, and recipients simply reply by sending their own voice email. Voice emails are particularly useful for role-playing activities and question and answer sessions. And to ensure security, instructors have full control of the distribution of every email.
  • Integrate into your Course Management System
    Our voice tools integrate with course management systems so they have the same look and feel as other tools, significantly reducing barriers of adoption and minimizing learning curves. Our vocal tools appear within your CMS like any other resource; if you know how to use your CMS, you already know how to use Voice Tools.
  • Oral Assessments
    Assess your students 24/7. Enable language instructors to build a wide range of test questions types, such as multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, pairing, voice dialogue, vocal multiple-choice, or vocal pairing multiple-choice. These questions can be associated with a variety of oral, visual, and text-based prompts, requiring oral and text-based responses. Learners simply log into the system and proceed through the test questions, recording their responses as they use Voice Tools.

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