So which web 2.0 tools are any good? and what is web 2.0 anyway? According to wikipedia web 2.0 is a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, it refers to a perceived second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis and communication tools —that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.
This cartoon comes from toondoo a site which is free to register on like most web 2.0 sites and allows you to drag and drop cartoon characters, really quite simple especially for people such as myself who are artistically challenged. Some of the other sites I use and are worth having a look at are:
Flickr: A photo sharing site. Very handy for field trips and putting multiple photos on moodle as you can select a bunch at once. There are a lot of options on how you want to share the photos as well. The site is also usable as a resource with many of the photos being copyright free and you can download them in any size you wish.
Webnote: This is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace. You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.
(The reason why this is indented and in italics is because it is a direct quote from webnote)
The other really useful feature is the web 2.0 homepage. Netvibes, myyahoo, googlehome, Pageflakes and Favoor etc. what these do is allow you to have all of your important information in one place. Emails, news , weather, search, bookmarks, to do lists and Calendars, in fact the list continues. The only downfall of this is the speed of the internet here in NZ which means on some connections it is a bit slow loading up but give it a try and see if it works for you.
Not really web 2.0 but very much about professional learning and collaboration is Slideshare. Slideshare allows you to view any one of several thousand slideshows and get ideas to use in your own Powerpoints.
One week of school to go so here is a link to another teacher video, Animal School.
I showed this video at the Science faculty meeting last week and it has some fairly thought provoking comments despite being geared towards America’s fear of China but you get the general idea.
I guess the overall idea is similar to that in the Ken Robinson keynote “how do we prepare students for a future which we can not predict” It seems then that having discussions about the quality and form of NCEA is happening at the right time. I came across the website of critical comment on NCEA a while ago and feel it is important for us as teachers to contribute to this arguement as they have been doing on Tony Milne’s blog.
Also came across the really awesome teaching stories wiki. It is great to see teachers starting to communicate their successes through the internet.
Yes not quite as exciting as as the next installment of CSI but what browser you use does have quite an effect on your internet experience. At present around 68% of people use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). Largely this is because it comes pre-installed on your computer and people never see any point in changing. Strange when we all like different colours or cars that we should stick with one browser. So what are your choices and why should you change.
The main competitor of IE is Firefox which like most browsers is free and available to download here. While the latest update to IE does allow tabbed browsing (that’s where rather than opening up a dozen windows in the task bar allows you to see them across the top of the browser, this is very handy for research and starting off lessons) it doesn’t allow you to have access to any of the free add ins. These allow you to add features such as download tools (for taking copies of YouTube) to Del.icio.us bookmarks. The easiest of these to use is Download Helper which copies any flash file to your computer. These files can then be played using FLV player 1.3.3 There are of course other options in browser such as
One of the most difficult things I find about being a Teacher is the constant demand for new things. So I hope by now a few more people in the cluster have set up their Del.icio.us accounts. It was really great to see teachers sharing their bookmarks and being able to find resources, like the maths powerpoints page which has now been added by several maths teachers across the two colleges.
The next major step for us to do is get the teachers moodle site up and running. I have given the Katmat site a bit of a tidy up and given all users teacher rights to it. All staff members have been added as users and for Katikati the passwords are the same as email, for Matamata they will need to be changed from the default.
In order to get the most out of moodle the following links give you both grapics and text on what to do
In reading through my RSS feeds the other day I came across a link to googlelit (Thanks to Weblogg-ed, maintained by Will Richardson) and it got me thinking again as to how this resource which only debuted in 2005 is continually changing.
As a Social Studies teacher I have always used Google Earth to pinpoint places at the start of a topic but now both thanks to a fast Internet connection at Katikati College and Peter Besley allowing me to help in his classroom, I saw thirty students placing their favorite locations on Google Earth. With a minimum of teacher direction other than a short session in class the week before the students were able to use the software to create their own fly throughs.
One of the students was already way ahead and she was able to start adding photos from her gmail to her Tour, pretty powerful stuff. To add some of this functionality to your Google Earth experience this makezine page has some good tips.
For the Geography Department Field trip to Rotorua we have done some GPS work and using EasyGPS we are able to download the tracks and waypoints onto computer then using GPS Visualiser we convert the data into a Goggle Earth KML file. All of this is free and realitively easy to use. The most difficult part was finding the serial to usb adapter to connect the GPS to the computer.
Over the past week my knowledge of web 2.0 tools has been increasing exponentially. I have been really impressed with some of the tools out there and hope to be able to share a lot of these resources with both the staff of Katmat and others.
I have been particularly impressed with netvibes which I now use as my homepage. The ability to have your rss feeds, all search engines and e mails in one place is very cool.
For those of you wondering about what Web 2.0 is the following you tube gives a bit of an indication of where the net is heading.
The other tool I am really pushing is del.icio.us this bookmark service allows you to share bookmarks with other teachers and thus stop the endless trawling through the internet looking for resources and lesson plans.
Now with all these tools I suppose the real challenge is to think how can they be used to motivate students and improve teaching and learning.
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