Educational Institutions Increasingly Adopt Wimba Voice

Schools Worldwide to Foster Personal Connections by Adding Voice to Teaching and Learning


NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - September 25, 2007) - Wimba, the education technology company that helps people teach people, announced that several institutions have joined a growing list of customers selecting Wimba Voice (formerly known as Voice Tools) to increase vocal interaction and student engagement throughout their online programs for traditional, distance or blended courses.

Many of these institutions have also adopted other tools within the Wimba Collaboration Suite, including Wimba Classroom (formerly Live Classroom), a virtual classroom platform, and Wimba Pronto, the education-centric instant messenger.

Institutions that have recently selected Wimba Voice include:

--  Arizona State University
--  Arkansas Virtual High School
--  Trinity College
--  University of Illinois, Chicago
--  Virginia Community College System
--  University of Sheffield
--  University of Waterloo
--  University of Western Ontario and Schulich School of Medicine and
    Dentistry
--  Western State College
    

"We've been using Wimba Voice for a number of years in the School of International Letters & Cultures to add audio support to our hybrid language courses," said Peter Lafford, Director of the SILC Language Computing Laboratory for Arizona State University. "We were so pleased with the results that we encouraged the University Technology Office to license it and make it available to the rest of the university."

Wimba Voice increases personal interaction in any online learning environment -- whether supporting traditional, distance or blended courses and classes -- by giving instructors and students the ability to easily exchange ideas and information with their own voices, no matter where they are. Wimba Voice supports subjects that are virtually impossible to teach effectively online without use of the spoken word, such as foreign languages and speech. Wimba Voice also enhances these and any other classes by integrating personality and connectivity.

"We deliver solutions that allow rich interaction between instructors and students as well as among students," said Wimba Chief Executive Officer Tommaso Trionfi. "Rich interaction means rich learning, something we strive to inject wherever Wimba solutions are used."

Wimba Voice supports an array of verbal exercises in any subject and supports vocal collaboration, coaching, and assessment. Using Wimba Voice, students and faculty can embed voice messages into course pages online, they can maintain threaded voice discussion boards and they can coordinate and participate in live group discussion and debates. Wimba Voice also enables students and instructors to easily produce and access class material as podcasts.

Wimba Voice continues to set the bar for vocal communication in online programs. Its array of features -- from voice discussion boards to podcasting -- offers the most flexibility for facilitating online vocal instruction. In fact, Wimba Voice is such a good fit for language instruction, that several schools eliminated their language labs and now only use Wimba Voice.

About Wimba

Wimba is a company focused solely on education and dedicated to the principle that people learn more when they are drawn closer together. Our collaborative software applications for the online education market enable institutions to bridge technology and pedagogy by supplementing course management systems with many of the proven disciplines of in-person learning environments. Wimba's intuitive solutions enable educators 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 course content, and more. Instructors can also use Wimba solutions to convert Microsoft Word documents into accessible course content and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product development.

Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com

Contact Information: Media Contact: Matthew Langan 202-298-7600 x219 matthew@dbcpr.com