LearnTech — a company that specializes in Web-based teaching, learning and research tools — is demoing its HyperFolio product at this week’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Chicago. Alas, there’s no Mac OS X version available.
The US$49.95 tool, which is available for both Mac and Windows, is designed for K-12 students, college faculty and students. It lets you to drag and drop text, pictures, videos and other media items from a Web browser, and sort and organize them into your own multimedia document.
You select media items from the Web and drop them into HyperFolio. You can now reorganize the items you’ve collected, and diagram/annotate them as well. All collected media items retain their URL addresses so you can revisit source sites.
You can create multimedia worksheets for use in class demonstrations, research papers and desktop or print-based activities such as tests, quizzes and homework assignments. HyperFolio users can share collections and worksheets with others by e-mailing them, presenting them live online or uploading them to the Web.
LearnTech also has an exchange center where you can download free HyperFolio templates and worksheets. A template has predefined visual and/or textual backdrops for you to use. A worksheet is the basic HyperFolio container that you can drag and drop media items from various collections, and arrange, organize and annotate them. (A collection is where you first accumulate your collected media items.)
Mac system requirements are a Power Mac 7100 or newer, Mac OS 8 or newer (except Mac OS X), QuickTime 3 or newer, Internet Explorer 4.5 or later, an Internet connection (optional, but extremely useful), 16MB of available RAM, 4MB of available hard disk space (the total HyperFolio application download size is approximately 2MB), and a color monitor (256 colors and 800×600 resolution or better recommended).