If you work in any type of academic environment, there's a huge chance that you might be using Blackboard for your CMS (Course Management System). Blackboard is a system that is prevalent across many college campuses and is even used by some high schools to manage course work, grades, assignments, and more.

In this found footage, Northwest College of Agriculture captured a video demo at ConnectED of the upcoming Blackboard application for iPhone and iPod touch. The application will allow you to connect to your schools Blackboard server and get important information from your account. I personally can't wait for this application to ship, and I'm sure many college students and professors are eager to use it. According to the representative in the video, the application will be free when it launches. If you didn't catch the application layout, you can see it on Flickr.

Thanks, Micah!

If you are a high school or college student, then you can now register a team for Apple's 2008 Insomnia Film Festival. The idea behind the festival is simple. Apple will post a list of elements you can use in your film, you pick three of them, and then take 24 hours to make a 3 minute movie.

If you are the lucky grand prize winner, your team will receive: 5 MacBook Pro notebook computers, 5 Final Cut Studio 2 box sets, 5 copies of Shake, 5 Logic Studio box sets, and 5 One to One personal training cards. That sure is a nice set up!

If you want to get in on the action, check out Apple's Insomnia Film Festival website, and register your team today! All the fun will start on November 15th at 9:00 a.m. EST. And if you like the Insomnia logo, Apple has posted wallpaper for both Mac and iPhone/iPod touch on the site.

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for high school & college-level help.

At any level of schooling, you eventually have to do a little research. There are probably those who caution against doing any of that research on the web, but if you're aware that faulty (and downright false) information exists and take the extra steps to ensure that what you're citing is verifiable, the net can be a treasure trove of information.

Hyperlinks and full-text search of a massive amount of information make the electronic frontier an ideal research tool. But you've heard all of that before, so read on as we look at some research tools specifically for Mac users (and we'll try to stay within a typical student's budget).

In an education world where parents make all the decisions and administration knows less about teaching than the students, teachers can use all the help they get. While I wait for Assistants R Us to open in the Denver area so I can take some of the burden off my wife's high school English-teaching shoulders, educators of all kinds might be able to take some solace in Planbook from Hellmansoft. Designed and developed by Jeff Hellman, a 9th grade physics and science teacher, Planbook aims to do away with the clunky ways of writing lesson plans with paper by providing tools to plan, attach files, print, publish and search the digital way. Teachers can plan out lessons for one or multiple classes for the week, month or year, attach files the students will need for homework and publish it all to the web via FTP or to a local folder. Students, parents and administrators alike can then view the site, the daily lessons and download the files at their leisure. Still need paper versions? No sweat - Planbook can print out customized reports for students and administrators, great for handing out or posting in class.

Since I am the farthest thing from a teacher, my wife graciously offered to give this software a whirl and share her thoughts. To be honest, after a minute or two of poking around, she was absolutely thrilled. She was impressed with Planbook's feature set and how easy it was to start writing plans for multiple classes. She loved the publish-to-web idea since her school already provides some digital records for parents to check from home, but I am sad to report that there was one killer deal-breaker that took the bounce out of my wife's step - Planbook is Mac-only. Now my wife is a Mac user through and through, but her school lives in the Windows world making Planbook ineligible for consideration.

[Update: Jeff Hellman stopped by to comment that he's one step ahead of me; he actually is working on a Windows version and hopes to enter beta this weekend. This could certainly boost Planbook's appeal in Windows and mixed-OS environment and for teachers who live on both sides of that fence between the home and office.]

If you or your teaching friends are fortunate enough to work on the Mac side at school, I (via my wife) definitely recommend you take a look at Planbook. Even as a 1.0 product it sounds like Hellman has hit most of the large nails right on the head, and more interest and support can only make a good product get better over time. Check out the Planbook site for more information, including an example published Planbook, as well as IM support and a Yahoo! Groups link. Individual licenses are $30, while volume licenses begins at up to 10 teachers for $100, going all the way up to 65+ teachers for $300. As a bonus, the volume license allows teachers to use Planbook on both their home and work computers.