Video: New Products January 2010

Win A Wireless Lab Sweepstakes Now Open!

Today, CDW-G and Discovery Education announced the opening of their eighth annual sweepstakes, "Win A Wireless Lab." The program gives K12 schools nationwide the opportunity to win one of three grand-prize 21st-century classrooms.  Each classroom includes tablet or notebook computers, notebook cart, interactive whiteboard, student response system, projector, printer and document camera.

The 2010 program gives eligible entrants additional opportunities to increase their chances of winning via Twitter.  After entering at http://www.discoveryeducation.com/cdwg, entrants who post about the program on their Twitter accounts can receive an additional two entries per day, for a total of three entries per day.

Why not give it a shot?

RoomPro Announces New Classroom A/V System

Classroom audio is a rapidly growing segment... something I wrote about recently in my coverage of last summer's technology conferences. It makes sense, as class sizes are often getting larger and the use of multimedia increases, teachers need integrated systems that can produce the audio from DVD's, computers, microphones, MP3 players, etc. You can't have separate systems for all of these.

Wisconsin-based RoomPro is a good example, and the company announced their new RoomPro ONE system this week. The system includes an infrared mic for teacher voice amplification, ceiling mounted speakers that are also attached to a projector mount, and a wall mounted control unit for switching between sources quickly. A particularly cool feature: the pendant-style mic worn around the neck has an audio-in port, so you can hook up an iPod, for example, and play it through the system wirelessly. Nice.

Nightshade: Free Open Source Planetarium Software

Happy New Year to you and yours! And what better way to mark the holiday than to ponder time, space, the universe, our seemingly inconsequential lives within it all.... and use some really cool planetarium software to display the stars. Nightshade is a new free open source program from Digitalis Education Solutions, which renders over 100,000 stars and provides all kinds of other cool images of deep space, the surface of Mars, pictures from the Hubble telescope and the like. Users can explore by tracing orbits and trails or see the outlines of constellations from a variety of cultures. I imagine this making a really engaging presentation in combination with a projector/interactive whiteboard and the lights out. And it's free!