Change, underestimated?

New video posted on you tube from the folks at common craft a very good explanation of how to set up and why to set up del.icio.us or any social bookmarking service.

I have been using my wiki, the link for which can always be found on the right hand side of this blog, a lot lately. The ease of editing and creating makes it a very useful tool. I remember creating a year 13 History website a few years ago and eventually giving up because editing and keeping it updated in dreamweaver/frontpage made it too difficult and time consuming to be worthwhile. A wiki on the other hand is just like its name, quick. So if you are getting your students working on a collaborative essay or other work try out a wiki. You can either use one of the free ones or both our schools have them within our moodle sites.

Stumbling upon the Paris in Prison photos on a wiki site made me realise the scope of wiki’s for a wider purpose, not that I’m encouraging you to create a fan site for the socialite but it was funny all the same.

While I find writing a blog entry a chore at times, contributing to wikipedia or a wikispace is fairly easy. All you have to do is click on the edit tab and while having rubbish written on a wiki does happen it is easy enough with PBWiki or any of the other free options such as Ben Nolan’s and  Foopad really it is a matter of personal preference. For some examples of ones being used by teachers check out this wiki or this one on pbwiki. Some of the quotes from the page express its simplicity

The results have been great. Simple to use (no reading of instructions), bugs
that we had with uploads were fixed without having to report them, and the
service is fast.
- Doug Chang, private tutor

technorati tags:wiki, education

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.

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.