Two unfortunate economic downturns…

The economy is definitely touching everyone.  Unfortunately in the past week it has negatively impacted two of my favorite web tools for the classroom. 🙁   Lookybook announced this week that due in part to the failing economy they have had to call it quits.  You can read more about the reasons behind their shutting down here.   Gcast also announced a need to go to a paid subscription for their phone podcasting service.  It will now cost $99 to use Gcast.  🙁

Lookybook was an incredible resource for classrooms because it offered a classroom library of picture books for free.  Hopefully another company will come along and work on bringing this idea back to life.

Gcast is a loss for sure, I loved using it as a place where students, teachers, and parents could create podcasts  without a computer.  It was very easy to use for those teachers and parents who were apprehensive to podcast via computer but willing to do it by phone.

There is another service that offers free phone podcasting.  Gabcast is a podcast over the phone service.  Gabcast is free to use and allows you to upload your audio files to a blog, website, or publish to iTunes.

Read my original posts on all of these websites below:

Lookybook

Gcast

Gabcast