tool

This week ATiT launched Pigeon - its new, all-in-one, standalone SMS networking, voting and audience response tool.  This new tool offers a confidential messaging system that allows conference and exhibition visitors send text messages to other subscribers of the service without exposing their mobile number. It also includes a handy, user-friendly audience response system based on SMS messaging - avoiding the need for costly keypads which can be used for all types of audience responses including voting.

Launched just in time for the IMEX exhibition in Frankfurt next week, you can  find out more about Pigeon at IMEX, the worldwide exhibition for meetings and incentive travel by visiting the Abbit Meeting Support Stand D780. You can also contact ATiT for more information.

On Thursday and Friday 14 and 15 January 2010 ATiT participated in the mid term project meeting of the European Commission Lifelong Learning Project SoRuraLL, which focuses on using information and communication technologies in rural parts of Europe, especially within the education and training domain.

Partners from Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, Belgium, Germany and Poland gathered in the excellent premises of Ellinogermaniki Agogiki to discuss the progress of development and pilots. The pilot activities are beginning now and will continue until July involving teachers in Greece, Spain and Ireland as well as learners in Germany and Bulgaria and citizens in Poland.

The objective behind SchoolCast was to plan, to design, implement and bring to pilot utilisation a content delivery system, whereby a variety of multimedia files (websites, video, audio, images) could be multicast to Irish schools using a 2-way satellite infrastructure, and cache the files at the school server for fast local access. Following its successful pilot phase which ran from February 2005 to December 2005, the SchoolCast project is now finished. Meanwhile the SchoolCast partnership continues between the 4 companies involved. ATiT, GCS and Intel are focused on opportunities in Ireland and Greece, while ATiT, Web-Sat and GCS are following opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa. More about SchoolCast also on the ESA Telecom website.

SchoolCast has been extended to allow for the development of several enhancements to the system and the team are working hard to make sure the service is ready to go for the new school term starting in September when it will operate for 10 primary and secondary schools and will be managed by NCTE. Part of the extension work will also be to carry out a study into enabling SchoolCast to operate as a viable multicast system over networks other than satellite.

Bernard Dumont, in collaboration with Soner Yildrim, published an article about the COSTER tool in the Council of Europe publication "Lifelong support for teachers in the ICT-enriched society". COSTER is now also part of a training course on Return of Investment in Distance Education given by the French Centre Inffo.

COSTER tool 2.6 is released! It is freely available to everyone who is involved in producing multimedia for learning and teaching purposes and who wishes to better plan and estimate the costs involved in the production process. This multilingual tool provides all the cost categories for video, website, videoconference, CD-rom etc. and contains average prices from Belgium, France and Spain. Find out more about COSTER here.