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The question persists, Is Web 2.0 going to lead to School 2.0? Is it truly transformative, or just more geek lust and magic tricks for consultants to perform on stage for the applause?"

how they are encumbered by lack of time, high accountability, bloated curriculum, aging computers, and insufficient access to technology. I hear story after story of how teachers can barely keep up with teaching as usual, let alone look for new and innovative ways to prepare students for the future.

That is a question that should be directed to national and district leadership; those who establish the overarching focus educators must follow in their classrooms. If standardized testing, assessment, and a broad curriculum is the main focus of education leadership, it doesnt matter whether or not Web 2.0 has the potential to better prepare students for the 21st century workplace. Until technology is viewed as a mindtool that fosters critical thinking and the implementation of curriculum, it will be seen as being in competition with a districts primary focus, instead of supporting it.

Web 2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated content, usability, and interoperability. The term was popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004, though it was first coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.[1][2][3][4] Although Web 2.0 suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the way Web pages are made and used. A Web 2.0 site may allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to Web sites where people are limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, video sharing sites, hosted services, Web applications, and mashups.[5] Whether Web 2.0 is substantively different from prior Web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as jargon.[6] His original vision of the Web was "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write".[7][8] On the other hand, the term Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0)[citation needed] was coined by Tim Berners-Lee for a web of data that can be processed by machines.[9]

One of the most popular posts on Edudemic in 2010 was The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You and I felt it might be time for an update to that list for 2011. In order to put together a list of the best Web 2.0 classroom tools, I polled my Twitter followers, Facebook fans (are they still called fans? Likes?) and ran a contest to try and get as many submissions as possible.