Another interesting product I came across at the E2BN conference yesterday was CourseSites by Blackboard. This was launched a few months ago, and is a free version of the Blackboard learning platform.
Basically CourseSites is a free, hosted online course creation and facilitation service that allows individual teachers and educators to add a web–based component to their courses, or even host an entire course on the Internet. You can choose choose your own URL, so students can find your page easily.
Teachers can set up 5 different courses, each with up to 50 students registered. It’s aimed at individual teachers, rather than whole schools. From what I can gather you can add more students, but then there will be a fee involved.
Students can access the course site via their Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Gmail accounts.
The course features include:
- Course Creation Wizard with Structure and Theme choices;
- Course Invitations;
- Sharing of course elements with social media services (i.e. Twitter);
- Live classroom powered by Elluminate technology;
- Voice Discussions and Podcasts powered by Wimba Voice technology;
- Access to partner technology, such as SoftChalk and Respondus software.
If you are looking for a free way of running an online course with a group of students then this is definitely worth a look – especially since it’s free!
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Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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