Wimba Is IDEAL for New Mexico!

IDEAL-NM Adopts Wimba Collaboration Suite(TM) to Enhance Education Statewide


NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - November 11, 2008) - Wimba®, Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, today announced that New Mexico's Innovative Digital Education and Learning program (IDEAL-NM) has selected the Wimba Collaboration Suite™, the education industry's leading multi-modal solution for virtual and blended learning, to pilot as its statewide collaborative learning platform. IDEAL-NM will deploy Wimba's comprehensive solution across its statewide network of higher education and K-12 institutions, which includes 89 districts and 22 college campuses, to enhance student engagement and collaboration and increase learning outcomes.

New Mexico was the first state in the nation to create a statewide eLearning system that, from its inception, encompasses all aspects of learning from traditional public and higher education environments to teacher professional development, continuing education and workforce education. This partnership with Wimba will enable IDEAL-NM to offer Wimba's Collaboration Suite across its network of institutions, facilitating the use of online video, voice, instant messaging, content authoring, application sharing and white boarding throughout the state.

"With a scope as large as ours, communication and collaboration are crucial," said Donna Harrington, eLearning Technology Director for IDEAL-NM. "The Wimba Collaboration Suite will enable us to bring our statewide community of users together online, so that we can collaborate, brainstorm, develop, and implement best practices that will help our students to succeed."

The Wimba Collaboration Suite of products, which includes -- the Wimba Classroom™ virtual learning environment, the Wimba Pronto™ instant messenger, the Wimba Voice™ audio solution, and the Wimba Create™ content authoring tool -- enables institutions to bridge the gap between technology and pedagogy by supplementing course management systems with the proven disciplines of in-person learning environments. Designed to work seamlessly within the existing Blackboard online course management system selected by the State of New Mexico, the Wimba Collaboration Suite enables convenient single sign-on and access to Wimba tools directly from the online course environments with which teachers and students are already familiar.

"This partnership with IDEAL-NM is a testament to Wimba's power to engage students and instructors in lifelong learning," said Tommaso Trionfi, CEO of Wimba. "We are very proud of the comprehensive and collaborative learning environments that the Wimba Collaboration Suite fosters, and we look forward to working closely with IDEAL-NM to bring students and faculty together for learning."

About Wimba

Wimba®, Inc. is a leading provider of collaborative learning software applications and services to the education industry. Our collaborative software applications for the online and blended education market enable institutions to bridge technology and pedagogy by supplementing learning management systems with many of the proven disciplines of in-person learning environments. Wimba's intuitive solutions enable teachers and students to quickly and easily teach and learn live online, engage in live chat and instant message exchanges, benefit from oral content being added to text-based content, and more. Teachers can also use Wimba solutions to easily convert Microsoft Word documents into online content and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product development. For more information, please visit www.wimba.com or send an email to info@wimba.com.

Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com

Contact Information: Media Contact(s) Kathleen Matthews Wimba +1.646.861.5193 kmatthews@wimba.com Melissa Chotiner DBC PR+New Media +1.202.292.4572 melissa@dbcpr.com