The site has 200 courses from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, IIT, Berkeley and other top schools. The courses cover many subject areas, and the site also has test preparation exercises for the SAT and GMAT. The lectures come in as YouTube videos. For some of them there’s a transcript, so you can read the lecture as well as watch it. Look over the lectures before deciding whether to join the class.

Most courses are free, though you can also pay for tutorial services. We looked at an American Literature course from Yale and a chemical engineering course from Stanford. Both looked great and we thought it was neat that they were captured on video, since, in the case of the engineering course, it was that teacher’s last year in the classroom. There are also some continuing education classes for adults.

The site offers course-building software for teachers, so they can easily add videos and lectures. It also lets you post your resume and letters of recommendation.

The Epson “IU-01 Interactive Module” connects to a computer to turn an ordinary projector plus wall into an interactive whiteboard. At $599, it’s apparently the first such “affordable” device to accomplish this trick. We looked them up and noticed that most interactive whiteboards sell for $1,000 or more.

The IU-01 can be used on any existing whiteboard, wall or smooth surface. It provides up to 96-inches diagonal and 102-inches diagonal of useable interactive area. Here’s the press release.

A You Tube video that’s been viewed over three million times tells you how to do this using a Nintendo Wii remote.

The site is aimed at kids 6 to 8, but isn’t babyish at all. We hear that many adults like playing along if their language skills need a brush-up.

You earn points as you complete quests, then use them to watch video clips and play games on the site. We weren’t familiar with “Martha Speaks,” a really cute show about a talking dog. The site also has “mad lib” type games, hangman, refrigerator-magnet play, and lots of other fun stuff. A progress tracker lets parents know what skills their child is developing.

Our high-speed Internet connection can be really slow, so we experienced several “screen loading” waits, but no more than is typical at these media-rich sites. Also check out pbskids.org/island.

It turns out that using Google Apps for online collaboration, spreadsheets and word processing saves schools a big chunk of dough.  The state of Oregon converted all its schools to Google Apps and saved $1.5 million a year. In Illinois, just one school district making the change saved $160,000. In Maine, science students are using Google spreadsheets to organize data collected in the field.

Big reasons for the savings: No need to buy software  and no need for expensive information technology workers to keep programs updated. You can find these free programs by going to Google.com/apps. Corporate users must pay a fee, but schools and individuals do not. More info here.

– BuzzVoice.com is a free service that will read your favorite news items and blogs out loud. You can listen on your computer, MP3 player or your iPhone and share the items with others on social networking sites like Facebook. It’s a pretty robotic voice, but tolerable.

–Cooliris.com helps you find, navigate, and subscribe to shows on the web, including TV episodes, news, etc.

commons.wikimedia.org is a good place to go for royalty-free art you can use anywhere.species.wikimedia.org gives you a “species of the week” and lots of animal facts. When we checked it was about polar bears. We learned that an adult male weighs around 770–1,500 pounds, while an adult female is about half that size. They’re fast and smart too, so don’t mess with the bear.  (By the way: Bob thinks it’s pretty interesting that not only is the North American Grizzly Bear the largest mammalian carnivore on Earth, it is the largest mammalian carnivore that has ever lived on Earth.)

Economists may not always agree, but they can do a good rap.  A YouTube video pits the late economist John Maynard Keynes against Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek  is the author of  ”The Road to Serfdom” and “The Fatal Conceit.”  John Maynard Keynes was a very influential British economist who favored heavy government intervention.

Both of their views are well-explained in this rap video by Russell Roberts and John Papola.   Joy thought the actor playing  Hayek should have had more hair. “He was never so nerdy,” she complained to Bob.

Russell Roberts is a George Mason University economist and host of  the EconTalk podcast.

–Google’s FastFlip, which makes it easy to flip between news sources, just added new content. They now offer 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets, news wires, and TV and radio. Some of the new sources include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star,  Popular Science, Reuters, National Public Radio International, Politico and U.S. News & World Report.

Bertha Palmer

Joy had no trouble adding the following information about Bertha Palmer, wife of the well-known land developer, Potter Palmer, to a Wikipedia article: Potter Palmer made provision in his will that a large sum of money should go to whoever next married Bertha. When asked why he would be so generous to his own replacement, he replied, “Because he’ll need it.”

In a few months Wikipedia is launching a new user-friendly interface to make it easier to edit and contribute articles. Wikipedia hopes to lure back the thousands of contributors who have dropped out as the encyclopedia’s rules grew more complex. The change is in reaction to some horrendous entries. In 2005, for example, John Seigenthaler Sr., a noted journalist, was said to be one of John F. Kennedy’s assassins.

Anyone can go to Wikipedia and add an article or edit one, but your contributions may be deleted by the higher-ups or “deletionists” as they are sometimes called. The key to getting something to stick is having lots of sources for your material. You can find an article on the history of Pez dispensers, for example, because lots of articles have been written about them. But you won’t find one on Adolphe Saint-Valry, a close friend of author Victor Hugo. As John Broughton, author of two books on Wikipedia, noted: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no mainstream media source writes about it, then as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the tree didn’t exist.”