gFlashPro for BlackBerry Storm

We're happy to announce we've just released a new gFlashPro, specially configured to take advantage of the BlackBerry Storm's large touch screen. This new version provides automatic multiple choice test creation, the ability to reverse the question and answer, a subset feature, and much, much more.

gFlashPro is available either as a separate application or as part of the gWhiz Suite. The gWhiz Suite contains gFlashPro, our reference program (gRefPro) and our graphing calculator (gCalcPro). Each of these applications has been specifically customized to maximize performance on the Storm.

If you have a Storm, you should definitely consider taking a look. You can get our software for your BlackBerry Storm either over-the-air or by downloading the program for your BlackBerry Desktop Manager.

Google for students and teachers

Many of our customers have become acquainted with Google applications, such as spreadsheets, throught the use of gWhiz products. Did you know that Google has now revised their terms of service (TOS), specifically to enable students and teachers to use their tools, and assure their privacy and security in the classroom? The Google Apps, Educator Edition is an extremely powerful and easy to use suite of web tools which allows teachers to accomplish important tasks in the classroom. Now with the revised terms of service, an important impediment to the adoption of Google tools for classroom use has been removed. Please see the posting in Google's forum, as copied below:

Changes to Terms of Services, SAS 70 Type II
Thursday, November 6, 2008 4:24 PM
Privacy and data ownership are top discussion points in this forum. Recently, Google has made some changes which should clarify our position.First off, we wanted to point you to our newly revised Terms of Service for Google Apps EDU which should be more precise in several of these areas. Much of the confusion and concern around our Terms of Service revolve around privacy and ownership of data. So, we'd like to be very clear on these two points:* Google does not claim any ownership or your content, and uploading your content into our systems does not change this. We do require certain licenses from you to publicly display or transmit data according to your wishes (eg a public Site or Document), but the content is not ours.* Google treats all data from Google Apps customers as "Confidential Information." We do not share or reveal private user content such as email or personal information with third parties except as required by law, on request by a user or system administrator, or to protect our systems. Unless prohibited by law, we always give our customers notice of such requests.We also wanted to mention that we have extended the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.Last but not least, many schools have told us of the importance of a SAS 70 Type II audit to ensure the safety of their students' and faculties' private information. We're happy to announce that an independent public accounting firm has verified the effectiveness of our technical processes and controls for Google Apps, and Google Apps has satisfactorily completed a SAS 70 Type II audit.As always, we appreciate your feedback as we strive to provide the highest quality of services to our customers. We look forward to the continuing discussion on these points. If you'd like further information on the privacy within Google Apps you can check our FAQ or the Google Privacy Center.

We at gWhiz applaud Google's efforts and accomodation of student's needs for privacy and security when using the internet. Teachers who are interested in how Google applications can be used for teaching can discuss ideas with other teachers in the "Google for Educators Discussion Group" (http://groups.google.com/group/google-for-educators). The ideas are free, and so are Google's tools! For ideas on how to use gWhiz products in the classroom, please visit our Educator's discussion area, (http://forum.gwhizmobile.com/forumdisplay.php?f=37).

gWhiz makes it to CNNMoney.com

Well, it's not exactly the cover of The Rolling Stone, but the GRE exam application built with our partner Kaplan Publishing made press headlines in a number of different markets. Here's the story from CNNMoney.com.

Better Late Than Never - gWhiz Contest Results

As I was looking over entries in this blog I noticed that I never mentioned the gWhiz Best Flashcard Contest we held last year in October. The idea was to recognize and reward those gFlash and gFlashPro card designers producing the highest quality content.

The contest was a huge success and highlighted some very cool cardsets created by our user community. I invite you to take a look at the contest results right here.

Maybe we'll have another contest this year :-D

gWhiz adds an educator to the team.

We are pleased to have Kevin Kisich, Ph.D. as the newest member of our team. Dr. Kisich is an educator, scientist, and all around nice guy. He will be helping us understand what teachers need in terms of mobile learning tools, moderating the Educator's Area of the forum, and showing many of the innovative ways that teachers can find to make our products behave completely unpredictably! His most important job, though, will be to listen carefully to the educators who have adopted our products, and to help work their suggestions into a series of mobile learning tools that works well no matter whom, or what you teach. Check out his first forum post on making gFlash cardsets which incorporate sound.

http://forum.gwhizmobile.com/showthread.php?t=70

Kaplan GRE Exam In The App Store!

February 2009 is already off and running here at gWhiz! We're pleased to announce that the GRE Exam Flashcards application is now available in Apple's App Store. Like the other Kaplan apps we've recently produced, the GRE Exam application was developed in close partnership with the good folks at Kaplan Publishing.

Like our recently released Medical Terms application, the GRE Exam app has two main functions - Flashcards and Reference. The Flashcards feature offers iterative study or quiz modes, multiple choice, and reverse Question & Answer. The Reference mode provides for quick word look-up and multi-word searches. Both modes feature target word synonyms, pronunciation, part of speech, description, and sample usage. You can read more about it on iTunes (link requires iTunes be installed).

As a quick side-note, it's been great working with the Kaplan people. They have an impressive quality control system that painstakingly examined each and every word in the GRE application for proper spelling, pronunciation, usage, and more. They even pointed out a misspelling we had in our code (who knew that reversible had an 'i' ??) As a bonus, they're really nice people too!

Alright now you future graduate students... get studying!!