Web+2.0

Our assignment was to explore Web 2.0 and learn all the tools it provides. Than we had to choose five Web 2.0 tools and think about how we could use these to incorporate them into our teaching.

Web 2.0 provides an infinite amount of helpful tools that be used in teaching. There were five that I liked the most; spring notes, authorstream, equizzer, ask, and skim. A writing tool I would use in class is ‘spring notes’ as it is an online notebook where you create pages and document all your ideas by combining wiki, word processing, and file organization. You start by choosing from two different notebooks; a personal notebook or a group notebook, which allows group members to read, write and collaborate on projects. Once you decide the type of notebook, you have the option to make it private for members only, or public for everyone to see. The first week of school, everyone in the class would create their spring notebook. The kids would have access to look at my notebook as well. I would put all relevant classroom information such as, syllabus, lesson plans, class activities, assignments, tests, quizzes or anything that may be helpful to the student. Students would be able to look at my page if needed to access what is due, what we have learned, or had any questions, they could go to my spring notebook. I would post weekly journals for the students to complete. This is so students are on their spring notebooks regularly and can check them at least once a week. If I had readings in class, I could assign them to students to write a mini response on their spring notebooks. I think over all this is a great tool for a classroom to keep students updated and to make it easier to grade, as everything would be in one place. The second tool is Authorstream, which is the new way to do PowerPoint. The original PowerPoint gave information with bullets, pictures and clip art. I have always liked PowerPoint for lectures and now there are many more functionality capabilities allowing the ability to do much more. When I am teaching history, I want my students to not only hear but visualize. I want them to be able to spell the names correctly of battles and important people in history. Being able to visually see the spelling in a PowerPoint provides this. I want history to be fun with great pictures or videos. That’s why PowerPoint is perfect. Authorstream PowerPoint can be shared with the world through blogs, websites, youtube and even iPods. I would use authorstream to follow my lesson plans each day. I would put short videos that relate to the lecture for students to watch. New tools like Live or pre recorded audio or video, would be great. While showing the power point, I would record myself giving the lecture. Once class is finished, I could sync the recorded lecture to the power point and upload it to spring notes. Each lecture would be accessible for each student to use if they were absent or did not understand the lecture. They not only could watch but listen to the lecture as well. Equizzer is my third tool that creates custom quizzes that can be taken online. I can create my own quizzes, which can also be synced to the students spring notes and I can manage and monitor my student’s scores. The quizzes can be fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, true or false or matching. I think this is a great way for students to study for each chapter or futures test. Each chapter would have a quiz waiting in their spring notes. These quizzes would help students read through the chapters to make sure they know the important information. The quizzes would then test the student’s knowledge of the information in the text book. The forth is a research tool called ask. It is so important to teach kids how to search on the internet. In an internet driven world, students should know how to find information when needed. This tool provides information from web, images, news, videos, maps and answers limitless questions. If a student needs to ask a question and their parents and teacher are not present they can go to ask, and simply type in their question. This is a very helpful tool to use even outside of school so each student should know where to turn when they have a question. The last tool that caught my eye was skim. This is a reader and note- taker. It is designed to help with papers, text and any projects you are working on. Adding and editing notes, highlighting important text, viewing of notes and highlights, bookmarks, extensive AppleScript support, giving presentations, export notes as text are just some of the many functions skim offers. This has so many great tools that kids can use to help them with projects and papers and is also a great tool to help students study as well; creating easy reading and note- taking. There is a lot of information in history so when I give my students a study guide for an upcoming test, they can use skim and search the portable document format for the history text. They are then able to take notes or highlight information they think will be needed for the test, bookmarking historical documents so they can access and review later in the semester for review of final exams. Making it easy to have all your information on one easy document is a great and easy studying tool for all students. Web 2.0 has so many amazing tools that help students as well as teachers in the classroom.