While there are plenty of tools for creating Wikis, Wikispaces happens to have a great interface and provides unlimited ad-free pages for K-12 educational purposes.

Record up to five memories of your day and make them memorable forever. Memiary is the weightless pocket diary.

This blog post on Ewan McIntosh's edu.blogs.com points out a new peer-reviewed study that links Web 2.0 to academic improvement. The report found that Web 2.0 tools encourage participation and engagement, especially for those students who are timid; help students continue classroom discussions outside of the classroom; let students who are so inclined continue researching anytime, anywhere; and instill a sense of ownership and pride in students for the work they publish online, which can lead to more attention to detail and a better quality of work. The report also found that one of the biggest obstacles to using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom was the time it takes teachers to incorporate those new tools into lesson plans. Although many teachers were familiar with the tools and used them in their personal lives, they were apprehensive about how to monitor Internet use in the classroom and the time needed to figure out how those tools should be used to teach.

Absolutely. One of the children in my class had waited to the end of the session to ask me if they could access Google Docs at home.

Last year's The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education - 2007 was very popular among readers, and now it's time for this year's edition. Since last year's post, I've written nearly one hundred other "The Best…" lists, including four lists (including this one) that have highlighted the best of 2008. These four - The Best Online Learning Games - 2008; The Best Ways To Create Online Content Easily & Quickly - 2008; The Best Internet Sites For English Language Learners - 2008; and this one -all include a reader's poll to see if others share my preferences.

Google Knol, Mountain View's answer to Wikipedia, launched last week and, while it can't yet match the volume of articles on Wikipedia, its focus on accountability and ownership makes it a better choice for students and teachers.

Blogging is becoming more and more popular in the classroom. Teachers can blog to stay in touch with parents and students or they can incorporate blogs from all of the students as a learning tool. The beauty of the student blog is that children from Kindergarten to high school can blog. No matter how you use blogs in your classroom, these tools will help you get started, enhance your experience, or bring the students into the fun.

We are at a crossroads in educating our youth. Since public schools became the norm for education, we've identified curriculum based on the social, political, and economic need. We've classified what counts into tight packages of content in subject areas as math, science, social studies, and so on. Echoing Owen, Grant, Sayers, and Facer (2006), our approach to teaching and learning, including the order and how information is presented to students, the stages of assessment and what constitutes appropriate discussion on those subjects have also been tightly defined (p. 31). Advancements in technology, principally Web 2.0, social software, and digital tools, have challenged what it means to be educated and how we proceed to educate our youth in a culture where innovation and creativity, lifelong learning, personalization (my own learning space), and knowledge from and with the collective vie for a rightful place.

There has been a lot of recent debate on the benefits of social networking tools and software in education. While there are good points on either side of the debate, there remains the essential difference in theoretical positioning. Most conventional educational environments are "Objectivist" in nature and highly structured in terms of students progress and choice. Social networking essentially requires a less controlled, user-generated environment, which challenges conventional views of the effective "management" of teaching and learning. Therefore, can social networking both as an instructional concept and user skill be integrated into the conventional approaches to teaching and learning? Do the skills developed within a social networking environment have value in the more conventional environments of learning?

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Teachers will explore the use of audio and video tools that support student learning, collaboration, and communication that extend beyond classroom walls. Audio and video content can be accessed online, created by individuals or groups and used for collaborative conversations. The first step of the course is acquiring and organizing existing content available from online. Next, is learning to use podcasting tools to create content. Participants can then expand from podcasting to screencasting and video to make use of the distributed, collaborative potential of these tools. The ability to easily publish content online will encourage teachers to rethink the way they communicate with students, and the way curriculum is delivered. Educators will become knowledgeable about 21st Century Literacy skills as they fit into the classroom.

Regular readers know that I'm a big fan of reflective practice--one of the greatest values of blogging for me has been that it's created a forum for me to regularly think about what I do and how I do it. But most people aren't ready to make that kind of time commitment so here's something that I think might be a perfect way to encourage reflection in the shortest time possible: the one sentence journal, a great idea from blogger Gretchen Rubin...

Using Emerging Technologies to Create Collaborative Learning Environments Dr. Leigh Zeitz, University of Northern Iowa (zeitz at uni.edu) Robin Galloway, University of Northern Iowa (galloway at uni.edu) Vinnie Vrotny, North Shore Country Day School (vvrotny at nscds.org)

Digital Portfolios Made Easy is a portfolio system developed by Dr. Leigh E. Zeitz and Andrew E. Krumm. It provides a system for presenting digital portfolios that is complete but simple. The growing interest in electronic and digital portfolios has created opportunities for practitioners to present portfolios that are more rich and interconnected than the traditional notebook professional portfolio. The greatest obstacle to creating digital portfolios, however, can be the practitioner's perception of the technology itself. The technology does not need to be overly complicated, and the goal of DPME is to make the process as transparent and intuitive as possible. The DPME templates provide a framework within which to build a standards-based, individualized professional portfolio. The DPME templates are provided in two formats, Word and HTML. These two formats allow practitioners of all skill levels to use software that most already have on their computers.

Fresno Instructional Technology & Innovation