Wimba Classroom 5.2 Released

SAN ANTONIO, TX--(Marketwire - June 30, 2008) - National Education Computing Conference (NECC) -- Wimba®, Inc., the education technology company that helps people teach people, today announced the release of its Wimba Classroom™ 5.2 software, pedagogically designed, easy-to-use, and universally accessible to best support student engagement. Utilized in thousands of classrooms across the country and abroad for online learning, blended learning, and professional development, Wimba Classroom 5.2 is fully-featured, live, virtual classroom software that includes audio, video, application sharing and content display.

Wimba Classroom 5.2 includes many significant enhancements to further customize collaborative interaction and instruction. These new features empower teachers to customize their instruction to better address the diverse learning styles of students -- helping them develop critical thinking skills and encouraging academic engaged time as opposed to time-on-task. These expanded technologies continue to promote the use and mastery of 21st Century skills. New features include:

Pedagogically Designed

--  Presenter On-The-Fly: Empower students to lead discussions,
    presentations, and demonstrations to engage their peers. The presenter on-
    the-fly capability provides teachers more ways to tailor instruction.
    
--  Resizable Chat Area and Participant List: Students and teachers can now
    resize the chat area and participant window to focus their attention on
    lesson content and the communication method that drives their individual
    learning style. This new feature also allows students who use closed
    captioning to expand the chat interface to support accessibility.
    
--  Usage Insight: Enables districts and schools to quickly gain insight such
    as attendance, duration, and participation. The Analytics API tool provides
    a means for extracting information about how the virtual classroom is being
    used by students, including how frequently students log in and how often
    they speak and raise their hand.
    

Easy-to-Use

--  Expanded Video Inputs for Classroom Capture: Wimba Classroom 5.2 supports
    a wider range of video input devices beyond the basic web camera so
    students and teachers have more options for classroom delivery and
    instruction reuse.
    
--  Expanded Whiteboard Options: New highlighter and rectangle tools are
    available in the white-boarding toolkit so that teachers can highlight
    important points and diagram concepts and processes using a variety of
    shapes, providing a visual indicator to students to reiterate and enforce
    learning concepts.
    

Universally Accessible

--  MP3 Downloads: Without the need for third-party tools, students and
    teachers can easily download the audio of an archived lesson or activity in
    a standard MP3 format to review and reinforce key concepts anytime and
    anyplace.
    

"Wimba Classroom 5.2 was developed to meet the expanding needs of students and teachers," said Yancy Oshita, Chief Marketing Officer of Wimba. "The new capabilities were developed to further expand collaboration and better engage students in their learning. Wimba is exclusively focused on the education market and we are committed to continually upgrading our product to exceed the needs and expectations of our customers."

Wimba Classroom is part of the Wimba Collaboration Suite™ which facilitates the use of online video, voice, instant messaging, content authoring, application sharing and white boarding. The Wimba Collaboration Suite works seamlessly within existing online classes to enable convenient single sign-on for teachers and students who can also access Wimba solutions directly from within their online teaching and learning environments. The Wimba Collaboration Suite integrates with the most widely used learning management systems including the ANGEL® Learning, Blackboard® and Moodle CMS platforms.

For more information about Wimba Classroom 5.2, visit www.wimba.com/k-12.

About Wimba

Wimba, Inc. 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 learning management systems with many of the proven disciplines of in-person learning environments. Wimba's intuitive solutions enable teachers 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 content, and more. Teachers can also use Wimba solutions to easily convert Microsoft Word documents into online content and to create and administer tests, quizzes, and exams. Our focus on education and collaboration with educators fuels our product development.

Wimba. People Teach People. www.wimba.com

Contact Information: Media Contacts Kathleen Matthews Wimba +1.646.861.5193 kmatthews@wimba.com Melissa Chotiner DBC PR+New Media +1.202.292.4572 Melissa@dbcpr.com