Eno Board for your perusal

Virtual Tours Help Students Narrow College Choices

"Your web presence allows [students] to narrow their options," Swartz said. "If they can get a sense of your people, your courses, your environment, it's a very compelling way to narrow your choices."

Check out this interesting article on eCampus News concerning colleges and universities utilizing virtual tours to enhance the way they sell their products (i.e. their schools) to prospective students. American University's virtual tour cost $90,000 and took two years to develop. The link is here.

Interesting reading, and an interesting way to utilize technology as an effective communications tool.

RSS Feeds and Your Cellphone

This is a reprint of a blog entry I wrote for the Times Union Technology Blog.

Hello, my name is Brian, and I am a blogger.

Ok, I’ve said it. Like many others, the blogging bug bit me many years ago when I asked my high school students to blog with me over the course of a semester in creative writing, and I haven’t stopped writing online since. And, from the looks of the blog rolls out there, lots of other people are blogging, too, about lots of things. There seems to be lots of blogs out there for every taste, which can lead to a bit of oversaturation for most busy users.

So how can one keep up with the overwhelming influx of information that is available in the blogosphere? How can I be sure I catch the latest missive from The Urban Muse (http://www.urbanmusewriter.com/) or Alan November (http://novemberlearning.com/blog/), when I often find myself buried in the minutiae of everyday life? Enter RSS.

RSS

In an effort to stay on top of the blogging game, and to somehow manage the plethora of information available to you at the click of a mouse, all you have to do is incorporate RSS onto into your daily blog reading regiment. Simply click the subscribe icon on most blogs (the orange icon above) to get new posts sent directly to your newsreader of choice, or, in some cases, you can simply sign up to receive new content via email!

But if checking a newsreader site is one step too many, or you have trouble keeping up with the downpour of email you get on a daily basis (for me as a teacher, I was a bit surprised to find that most high schoolers don’t use email at all, preferring Facebook or IM’s to the now “old school” email), the dilemma is to find a way to deliver the content right to where you will actually see it: and for most people the answer is their cell phone.

So I did some research, and lo and behold I found Web-Alerts (http://www.web-alerts.com/). Simple to use, all you need to do is enter the URL of the site you would like to follow (http://brianstumbaugh.net/blog/, for example) and Web-Alerts will look up the feed for the site. Once it finds it, all you need to do is enter your cell number and- BAM!- you get text message alerts right on your phone.

Pingie (http://pingie.com/beta/index.php) is a very similar web application, although still in Beta form. It’s easier than Web-Alerts, and allows for a quicker application process, but the results are the same. Once you apply and set up a free account, you can direct any feeds you want to follow right to your phone. Very cool, and easy as an option for those among us too busy to be chained to our computers all day.

Oh, but be careful, normal text messaging rates apply, so unless you have unlimited texting, this could get expensive. And since a growing number of us have smartphones that have free RSS reader apps, this might seem a bit unnecessary. But there are some of us out there who don’t have the fancy bells and whistles type phones, but we just about all have cell phones. Why not bring the web to that world?

This video from Alan November challenges schools to globalize curriculum as he tours his hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Great to get you thinking!


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