For some time now, educators have been making use of Skype to connect with each other. To help them further, Skype had launched this service in beta last December. It is now a full-fledged social network available across the world.

• Skype in the classroom

The service was developed with the help of teachers who were already using Skype for educational purposes. Through Skype In The Classroom, teachers from different parts of the world can get in touch with each other, to broaden their knowledge of a given subject or project., through an exchange of ideas and information.

Educators can find each other by filtering based on certain criteria such as subjects of interest, location and age group they teach.

During the beta phase itself, the service was available across 99 countries and was used by 4,000 people. Now, they have over 8,400 teachers on board with 290 project discussions.

Interested teachers can sign up using their Skype id, and create a profile by filling in their details, which will be stored in a directory. Others can then go through this directory to find teachers from the same field. They can also locate others in the same field by searching for specific keywords.

Discussion about Anti-Bullying project posted on Skype in the classroom

Educators will be able to enhance their own knowledge of a subject and then impart it to their students. The possibilities are endless. The service will also make it possible for students to be addressed by guest lecturers or even to have interactive sessions with students from other institutes.

Teachers in Peru could setup video conferences with teachers in England to teach their respective classes English & Spanish! Others could collaborate on anti-bullying and other social efforts that concern most educators.

A similar service, called EDge, was launched last year by The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, which is a primarily American organisation. However, Skype’s worldwide user base might help make it a more popular choice.

Responding to a post on the Google Webmaster Help forum, John Mueller stated, “In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get additional credibility from Google.”

SEO professionals starting paying more attention to links from .edu and .gov domains after Google’s update nicknamed Jagger, where reciprocal links were devalued and more importance was paid to links from sites having greater authority. Educational institutions are usually very choosy about whom they agree to link with. Websites of well known colleges and universities also typically have higher PageRank. The conclusion that such a link would be more valuable is therefore not really far-fetched.

A link from a .edu or .gov site is neither easily available free of cost nor through payment. These websites link only to extremely relevant and trustworthy sites or other equally popular sites. Immaterial of whether the domain extension of such a site is .edu or .com, it fits the bill for a good quality, desirable site to get a link from.

Back in April 2006, a post on High Rankings Forum asked whether there was any evidence that having inbound .edu and .gov links was “better” and counted more than other links, to which forum moderator Jill Whalen answered with a simple “no”. It would seem though that Jill may have been in a minority here as many SEOs voiced their belief in the SEO goodness of .edu and .gov links on a post at SEO Roundtable.

There is no absolute proof that search engines do or do not consider .edu links to be more valuable. Even Google’s, John Mueller does not categorically deny the value of a .edu domain. All he says is that they “generally” do not get more credibility from Google. This does not mean that link from respectable universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale will not count for more. Though, the fact rests that there are a lot more good attributes associated with all of those university websites than just their .edu extension.