Education Associations Leverage Wimba to Enhance Connections With Academic Administrators, Faculty, Teachers, Librarians and Technologists

Traction Increases Across K-12 and Higher Education Communities


ARLINGTON, VA--(Marketwire - March 12, 2008) - (From CoSN's 13th Annual K-12 School Networking Conference.) Wimba® Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, today announced that leading education associations and publishers rely on Wimba solutions to enhance collaboration and interaction among their members. The following organizations use Wimba technology:

--  The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN): Organization serving K-12
    technology leaders providing products and services to support and nurture
    leadership development, advocacy, coalition building, and awareness of
    emerging technologies
    
--  IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC): Global, nonprofit, member
    association dedicated to the support of standards, innovation, best
    practices and recognition of superior learning impact
    
--  Infopeople: A federally-funded grant project of the California State
    Library to provide training to the library community through California.
    
--  National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD):
    Organization made up of 700 community college members, dedicated to the
    professional development of faculty, administrators, and staff; and to the
    continued improvement of teaching and learning, with the ultimate goal of
    student success
    
--  Professional Media Group LLC: Publisher of leading education trade
    magazines District Administration and University Business
    

CoSN, InfoPeople and NISOD have all used Wimba Classroom™ for the past five years or more for professional development and training for teachers and collegiate faculty (respectively) across the United States. NISOD also uses Wimba Voice™ as the basis of its new podcasting series.

"By partnering with Wimba, NISOD had been able to expand its membership services and enhance the visibility of our organization," said Evelyn Waiwaiole, Director of NISOD. "Because Wimba has already mastered the technology and the necessary resources and assistance needed to make their services operate with ease, NISOD has been able to focus energy and efforts elsewhere -- thinking about new and additional membership benefits for our organization. The partnership has been a win-win!"

Access to Wimba by the members of these associations has resulted in greater use in higher education and K-12 classrooms. Recent higher education institutions licensing the Wimba Collaboration Suite include Athens State University (AL), College of the Mainland (Texas), Darton College (GA), Southern University and A&M College (LA) and University of Texas at Brownsville (Texas). K-12 additions to the Wimba community include Arkansas Virtual High School, Chinook School Division (SK, Canada), Kamehameha Schools (HI), Kenai Peninsula Borough School District (AK), Myron B. Thompson Academy (HI) and Virtual Virginia.

"We are pleased that many of the educational associations are using Wimba to enhance teaching and learning for their members," said Yancy Oshita, Chief Marketing Officer at Wimba. "Connecting the leaders and members of these organizations through Wimba provides new opportunities for collaboration through exchanging knowledge and ideas -- that is our primary goal."

The Wimba Collaboration Suite™ includes Wimba Classroom™, Wimba Pronto™, Wimba Voice™, and Wimba Create™. These enterprise solutions facilitate the use of online video, voice, chat, application sharing and white boarding. The integration of these tools into typically static, text-based online courses or the traditional classroom enhances the learning experience through greater collaboration and interaction. Real-time communication around rich content, visualization using video, and participation through voice in an otherwise text-based course compels active involvement to facilitate the learning process. Wimba enables greater teaching opportunities by allowing teachers and students to express their most important asset -- themselves.

For more information about the Wimba Collaboration Suite, visit www.wimba.com.

About Wimba

Wimba 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 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 web pages, and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product development. http://www.wimba.com or send an email to info@wimba.com

Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com

Contact Information: Wimba PR Contact: Melissa Chotiner DBC Public Relations +1.202.292.4572 Melissa@dbcpr.com