Augmented Reality

Using a technology called augmented reality, the computer (using special glasses) displays objects that look like they are part of the real world. For instance, when standing at an archeological site, you can walk through the site and see structures that are no longer there.

Assistive Technologies

Assistive technologies can support students with special needs or circumstances (e.g. enlarged text for visually impaired learners, speech recognition software, and screen readers such as JAWS)

Blogs

"Web logs -- Blogs for short -- are the surprise wedding of the informational capacity of journalism and the speed of instant messaging" Blogs, both public and private, provide a means to create a personal journal or diary. They typeically consist of brief and frequent postings arranged in chronological order.

Digital Portfolios

The use of portfolios can provide online displays of one's learning or work in one or more areas. Digital portfolios of students progressing through an online program will provide instructors with valuable clues about learner progress, self-awareness, and risk taking. Learners might include objectives, philosophies, sample work, presentations, prictures, employment histories, resumes, and current projects.

Instructor Portals

Instructor Portals are online web sites wherein lecturers, professors, and support staff can share and find information that might help them teach better or connect one's class to other classes around the globe. Additionally, instructor portals might allow college professors to find new positions or online courses to teach. In effect, they create a free market exchange of ideas and expertise within higher education.

Interactive News Media

Events, activities, and annoucements in the daily news are now often illustrated with animations, simulations, and supplemental material. As a result, online news sotroes are often explained with short videoclips, sound, and PowerPoint presentations. Flash animations are becoming increasingly powerful and cost effective way to illustrate current events.

Online Language Learning

There are a number of tools and portals emerging to teach a language online as well as to certify the learning of that language. While English is perhaps the most popular online language today, the number of online languages is growing.

Video Papers

TERC, a not-for-profit education reserach and development organization based in Cambridge, MA created a software system called video papers, which enables learners to comfine text, videos, images, and other media into one presentable product. A video paper autor can create navigational links, slideshows, and connections between the media used. This technology can help learners organize media for presentations. It might also highlight standards in a profession such as accounting, law, nursing, or education with the text of the standard in one window and a video of an expert in action in another.

Voice Information Retrieval Tools

With voice information retrieval programs, computers can now respond to voice commands with requested information. Such technology may alter the search strategies of online students. Instead of typing in sereach requests, learners can now state their queries, make suggestions, and pose questions to a computer and await an answer.

Adventure Learning

Adventure learning was created in the 1990's to engage learners in the adventurous study of the global enviroment. Adventure learning provides learners with a more immediate connection to a real-world exploration or activity using technology. Tools and activities for adventure learning include virtual fieldtrips, ask an expert forums, cross classroom collaboration, debate forums, and electronic apprenticeship or mentoring.

Online Mentoring

Online mentoring from experts, practitioners, and peers might provide help, hints, and scaffolded assistance on the Web. Such support can be directly related to a unit or content area or it might extend across a set of course experiences. However, because of language barriers, and such it has yet to reach it's potential.

From: Professor Bonk's "A Perfect E-Storm"