Playing w/ Community Walk

I was doing a little surfing around and discovered a blog in which the writer was providing viewers with a list of his 15 favorite Web 2.0 tools. I decided to check out a few that I was unfamiliar with. On was a site called CommunityWalk where users can create their own Google-esque maps complete with markers for places and provide images of those places. This would be a great educational tool for students to create virtual field trips of a city, town, state, or country. Users can also copy and then paste the code necessary to post their map on to their blog or web page. This could be a really cool tool for visual projects. In my playing with it, I created a map showing the schools within my district. It should appear below.

CommunityWalk Map - Lake Region School District

Playing w/ Slide

Playing w/ Photobooth

Today I was playing with Photobooth on my MacBook. I loved this Andy Warhol effect. I was able to export the pic to iPhoto and then play with it a little bit. I really liked this.

My Wiki

If you look at my links on the right side of this blog you will see a link to my wiki. On this wiki you will find (at the time of this post) information about myself and a link to a page about some of the Web 2.0 tools I discovered while at the FOSSEd conference this past June. For those of you who do not know what a wiki is, to put it in simple terms, it is a webpage or site where other viewers or friends can change and update the information on it. You have probably heard of wikipedia, which is entirely created by various viewers who are self-proclaimed experts on the topics that provide content for. A wiki has great potential in the classroom. There are teachers who use wikis for collaboration activites. One example is creating a wiki about a novel a class is reading, with some groups working on chapter summaries while others are creating pages on vocabulary, information about the author, or plot mountains. Another classroom use of a wiki is to have the teacher and students collaborating together in creating the textbook for whatever topic they are studying.

There are several different choices available to the educator who wants to create a classroom wiki. I use wikispaces, but there is also pbwiki, wikidot, wetpaint, and many others. You can also create a wiki in Moodle (if your district has a Moodle server).

There are many more educational used for a wiki and I have only touched on a few in this posting. If you do a search of wikis in education, I am sure you will find more ways to use this collaborative tool.

Web 2.0 Revisited

At our Summer Technology Institute 2008, it was asked by a couple of attendees, "What is Web 2.0?" A few years ago I started a web page that attempted to answer that question as well as share classroom uses and provide examples of Web 2.0 tools. It occurred to me that I had neglected to complete this page and that I was much more aware of the many tools available to educators. It also occurred to me that I was neglecting my blog, having only written a few post throughout all of last school year. So, my goal for this school year is to complete and update the "What is Web 2.0?" site and to write posts to my blog that align with those changes. So, if you frequent my blog or have it on your RSS subscriptions, this is what you can expect to see in the near future.