Chatting in the Hallway. Studying in the Dorm. Meeting on the Quad. The learning environment does not stop at the classroom door. There are no hallways or common spaces online to foster the kind of informal chats and social exchanges that are so vital to learning and building an academic community.
That is why there is Wimba Pronto, an academic instant messaging platform designed to bring informal learning settings online.
Wimba Pronto’s Unique Academic-Centric Features
The only instant messenger designed for educators to advance and promote learning, Wimba Pronto includes unique features to specifically benefit students, teachers, and educational institutions including:
Wimba Pronto Basic
Wimba Pronto Basic is a free, limited version of Wimba Pronto for schools looking to introduce collaboration to their educational institution.
*Please note that Wimba Pronto and Wimba Pronto Basic currently work for schools with the Blackboard Learning System 6.3+ and above and with Blackboard (WebCT) Campus Edition 6 and Vista 4. Wimba Pronto and Wimba Pronto Basic also work with Moodle.
"Wimba Pronto intuitively responds to the demands of the current university environment by offering today's college student state-of-the-art and just-in-time connectedness to the college community, its students, faculty, staff, organizations, and services."
-Christy Talley, Education Program Specialist, Distance and Distributed Education Center, University of West Georgia
"Wimba Pronto is a significant step forward in providing a robust collaborative environment for students and instructors. Instant communication capabilities extend the boundaries of the classroom, enabling learning to take place anytime anywhere. Students can stay connected and continue to build relationships while expanding their learning within a social context."
-Eric Kunnen, Coordinator of Instructional Technologies, Grand Rapids Community College
"Wimba Pronto strikes me as a terrific enhancement to our course management system (CMS) environment in which our students are online from anywhere at all hours. I realize our CMS facilitates e-mail among classes, but e-mail is so slow...so yesterday! Since our students today are all doing instant messaging already, Wimba Pronto will be great for our students because it will give them instant access to classmates who happen to be online at the same time, without the cumbersome overhead of commercial instant messaging: 1. Agreeing on an instant messaging client (AIM? ICQ? MSN? Yahoo!? Ruckus?) 2. Doing the authorization dance (What is your screen name? "Please Authorize me to add your name..." etc.) 3. The issues of exposing students to the outside world of instant messaging spam, for official, university-sanctioned (or -encouraged) communication. Working with Wimba to have them provide and host their protected academic instant messaging environment sounds like something worth looking into."
-Peter Lafford, Director, Language Computing Lab, Arizona State University
To view the Wimba Pronto Privacy Policy, click here.
Read about the new Wimba Pronto (.pdf)
