Web 2.0 Applications

My understanding of Web 2.0 tools:

I have tried to get my team to do Wikis, but we didn’t do too well with it.  One of the struggles in education is getting people who have been teaching for a long time to change their ways and try new things.  I thought Wikis would help our team planning and communication, but we didn’t end up using it very much due to others who wouldn’t participate. 

I love social bookmarking.  I use Pinterest all the time!  I have professional and personal pins!  It is a great way to keep up with things that you love on the internet!  It has replaced some of my idea notebooks.  I hadn’t heard of some of the other ones.  I plan to spend some time on delicio.us, Diigo, Yahoo Bookmarks, and Blogmarks this summer to see if they are something I wantto use with my kids.

Voice thread is completely new to me!  I love that it is cloud based and use images, videos, documents as well as voice notes.  I am so excited about learning about this multimedia slideshow.

How can they benefit/impact today’s education?

I have thought about using Wiki with my students, but I hadn’t tried it, yet.  However, I think for a team it is a valuable tool.  I love that I can put stuff on there and others can immediately access it.  We do use Google Docs quite a bit, and that is very close to the Wikis.  We have a social book marking site for our school called ikeepbookmarks.com.  We can up load sites that we want our kids to use, and pin them to that one site.  However, I really like how pinterest uses images to give you an idea of what the page is about.  I want to play more with the others to see if I like them better.  Voice thread is a fabulous idea!  I can see using it for a problem solving station where kids record their thoughts on how to solve the problem.  I could also see it as a station in language arts.  I could put a piece of poetry on there, and the students could add images and their thoughts about inferences or understanding.  My mind is racing with ideas!  I truly hope I can get that up and running before school starts!   I am getting more excited with every assignment!

I know that technology has changed the schools in the last 16 years that I have been in the classroom.  I am sure that in the years to come it will continue to change.  We have to find ways to incorporate these Web 2.0 applications in order to build a student who is a 21st century learner!