Publisher McGraw-Hill is offering college-level content for the iQuiz game application, recently launched by Apple and designed for iPod. iQuiz is available from the iTunes Store [in the Games category] for $.99 and works with all fifth generation iPods.

An instructor who uses McGraw-Hill Higher Education’s EZ Test Online program can create and deliver multiple-choice or true/false quiz questions using iQuiz for iPod. To set up and deliver a quiz to students via iPod, instructors press the iQuiz button in EZ Test Online to export a quiz ready for use with iQuiz. Once students download the quiz into their iPod, they can use the interactive iQuiz to practice and learn the content specific for their course. Students can self-assess and receive their quiz scores instantly.

See the full press release from McGraw Hill.

Register for EZ Test Online.

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A new social networking site lets you share your budding vocal talents with web users everywhere. SingShot is a website devoted to creating, sharing, and commenting on other people’s renditions of popular songs.

A site like this could be quite useful in education - language students, vocal students, instrumentalists or actors and performers could post their work and invite critiques and suggestions from other users. However, it would likely run into problems with student privacy laws if done in connection with course and outside of institutional servers.

A columnist at Slate provides some humorous observations on using SingShot.

I started belting out songs—”Heartbreaker,” “Independent Women”—that I would’ve never dared to perform in front of a live audience. I stayed up nights recording take after take, track after track. But to my chagrin, the bleats that came out of my throat sounded feeble. My voice cracked on high notes; I had trouble with rhythm. The main advantage of a karaoke Web site, I learned, is that I could humiliate myself 24 hours a day.

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AjaxLife is an web application that lets you use Second Life in your web browser. Well…sort of. It lets you chat with friends, and reposition yourself (’teleport’) throughout the SL universe, and that’s about it. Nonetheless, people are excited about it. Could it be that more than a few SL users are disgruntled with the slow speed of Linden’s servers?

More info here, and an interview with the (15 year old!) creator, Katharine Berry, here.

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There are podcasts out there for just about everything - even geeks who take up farm living. Among the several discipline-based podcasts floating around the educational podosphere, there are also a few that focus more specifically on academic technology. A short list culled from a post on the POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network) listerv follows after the jump (click below for more).

(more…)

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Researcher danah boyd has produced a new study of Facebook and MySpace users, finding that the differences between the two have more to do with class than age or other factors. Facebook is attracting more affluent, middle class young people who have a focus on college and careers; MySpace seems to be attracting more minorities.

Faculty that are looking at social networking as part of class activities might want to examine both sites closely; the different audiences for them could make for interesting class activities involving student research.

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Can a game be educational if it isn’t fun? That’s the question tackled by a columnist at Slate; the column concentrates mainly on “edugames” aimed at corporate training and the K12 market, but raises some interesting points about student engagement and educational games (or instructional technology in general).

article at Slate.com

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