Abhay Parekh recently launched a new application, Flowgram, that those in the computers and writing crowd may want to check out. Think of it as Powerpoint-plus. An online screencasting program, Flowgram enables you to load URLs, images, and Powerpoints onto the web, to add layered audio, notes, and highlighting, and then to play the pages or to share them.

The audio isn't terribly sophisticated, but you can layer sound, set the time that pages are on the page, and shift the order of pages with click-and-drag. Viewers can scroll through the web pages or activate embedded video clips or audio.

For orientation at University of Miami, I put together a couple flowgrams, Web 2.0 and the Writing Classroom and More Web 2.0 for Writing. The interface is really easy to use and even the tech-phobic seem to find it relatively undaunting. (A similar application, VoiceThread, which allows for collaborative commenting, struck some of my colleagues as much more difficult to use.) Flowgram is still in beta, but I've encountered minimal bugs--and when I have, the developers have been very responsive to feedback.