Teacher’s day Special : Five ‘Frontrunners’ of “e-learning 2.0″
To make this year’s Teacher’s day special for our readers(expecting atleast few teachers
within our readership domain),we have come up with a list of websites which are making a significant(if not great) contribution in the field of education of different sorts.
But there is one thing that remains common among all the sites that have made it to this list…
They are all e-learning 2.0 websites,which means they are open(unlike closed,transaction based systems),community fueled(unlike tutor sourced) and employ Web 2.0 technologies to execute their mission(and that’s actually a special and unique thing about this list).
They defy the old methods of learning on the web and have certainly achieved their goals to an remarkable extent.
So,here goes the list :
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Teachers.tv
It is a UK based professional development site for educators which offers High definition videos,lectures,episodes,interviews,researches and related stuff in every 
dimension of education.The quality of the content it serves makes it “One of its kind“ destinations in the e-learning sector.
Here,the majority of content is serious in nature and contributed by educators all over the world but the level of contribution from peers/students isn’t that great(which also preserves the quality of the system,bcoz there is a trade-off between quantity and quality).
–2————————————————————————
Footnote.com
This is a unique entry in this list.This is less of a theoritical(bookish) knowle
dge sharing site but more of a “Collaborative digging into History“ site.
In their own words,
“It is a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past“.
Footnote nurtures a community of people that are passionate about a variety of topics relating to history.And they all play a critical role in making this website a huge repository of original historical paraphernalia.
-3————————————————————————-
Learnhub.com
It can better be defined as a “Social Learning Network“.Being a social n
etwork of educators and learners,they aim to make learning online fun and engaging, and teaching online easy and effective
It equips its users with more than seventeen online tools that makes “educating” as well as “learning” a engaging cup of coffee.
Here,the contribution is very much balanced between educators and learners.The moment they start penetrating the global market(It’s US dominant at the moment),they will win more hearts in the time to come.
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Teachertube.com
This can be quoted as “The Youtube of educational Videos“(If you find 
some other stuff,then it’s just a matter of quality-quantity trade-off).Teachertube boasts off an exhaustive amount of videos related to education,contributed by educators and students.
The content quality compromises a bit but the quantity makes up for the quality void.
In their own words,
“Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers “
-5————————————————————————-
Edufire.com
They aim to create a platform which allows live learning taking place all over the Internet
anytime from anywhere.They also give an opportunity to the tutors to get paid for the time a tutor invests into live-tutoring.
The best part is that the tutor sets the price of tutoring and majority of that price goes into teacher’s pocket only(unlike the KPOs,charging big money from the learners and feeding meagre bucks to the tutors)
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Again, Happy Teacher’s day !
[...] also had a short write-up in a TechPluto article entitled “Five Frontrunners of e-learning 2.0″. They aim to create a platform which allows live learning taking place all over the Internet [...]
Thanks for the mention. I have blogged about this here:
http://blog.edufire.com/2008/09/06/a-couple-of-cool-edufire-mentions/
Thanx to Jon(edufire) & Jason(teachertube) for their feedbacks(for both comments and e-mails we received)
Smart social networking like LearnHub , and the other good companies above, is great for students. Too much time is wasted on Facebook and MySpace. Now social networking can be productive. Thanks for publishing this list and bringing attention to these sites and spreading the word about this new social networking trend.
Thanx Colin for ur comments(and e-mail)
@Colin, yes, you’re right social networks can be productive and educational. For example, we have about 400,000 members learning more than 90 languages on this social network: http://www.italki.com. We’ve had some some great success stories. Over the next couple of months the site should get even more useful for foreign language learners. Foreign language learning just lends itself so well to the internet as edufire has discovered and as mentioned in regards to LearnHub going global.
[...] An area which has been typecasted as an “offline only” facet in education sector is “Foreign language learning”.There have been very limited attempts to create a intelligent online marketplace for foreign language learning till date.One of such attempts is Myngle(another is edufire,which we covered recently). [...]
I couldn’t agree more with the social networking model applied to learning sites…..students are so readily drawn to these networks that it’s a very natural and proven forum for them to interact, so why not learn in the same environment? Our company has provided just such an environment for over a year and we’re growing rapidly: http://www.ziizoo.com. I wish we could get a review here Colin, hint, hint!
Great list, thanks for posting this. I have been a faithful member/student of http://www.edufire.com and I a loving it. It is great that technology keeps advancing so that everyone can take advantage of it!
[...] so majority of users will find a tutor for their needs from some place or the other.We have recently featured few websites which are also performing really well in the field of Online education. addthis_url = [...]
special education teacher…
I found your post comments while searching Google. Very relevant especially as this is not an issue which a lot of peaople are conversant with….
Hi, I read this post titled “ontrunners of “e-learning 2.0″ | Startup Reviews|Tech news|Tech events|Tech tips” about a week ago, might have been last Saturday, and thought it was a good point. I’ve been trying for the last few days to find your site again but ended up finding it in Google using the keywords “e-learning”. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to post last week but I will be returning regularly. Bookmarked the page.
Well… that’s the way to go!