Web 2.0: Enhancing Education Through Technology

This article provides a number of new tools, but also explanations regarding their practical usage in any classroom. Newer ones include Ipiccy, Easel.ly, Infogr.am, InfuseLearning, BigHugeLabs, SignGenerator, Delivr, Aurasma, TheNounProject, and WeVideo. Others that are more commonly known are: Padlet, Thinglink, & PollEverywhere

Darren & Sandy Van Soye , former IT specialists, will be embarking on a 424 day journey around the world visiting 50 countries on six continents in January 2012 to raise geography education awareness. Subscribe to follow them on their trek and receive weekly educational materials at no cost.

describes using Facebook with AP U.S. History high-school juniors.

This article points out the significance and the approach to the digital writing in a dialogue style with Troy Hicks, an associate professor of English at Central Michigan University. He uses 'MAPS' heuristic -- mode (genre), media, audience, purpose, situation -- to help writers "intentionally" and "deliberately" think through composing digital texts. He also suggests teachers give themselves and students the opportunities and permission to play (and possibly fail) with the tools, as this can serve as a model of overcoming learning curves and digital writing process. This reminds me of the idea, 'dabble' with the tools, brought up by Jeff Utecht(2013).

This blog contains the first 3 steps (out of 7) for website evaluation.  The author is using letters to represent each step.  Thus far, he has A for author; B for bias; and C for currency.  Each step is explained and a poster is included for teachers to print and use in the classroom.  This is very important information for students in order to become responsible digital citizens.  Students need to think about who is writing, why they are writing, and when they are writing.  I am anxious to see what other steps the author will include.

Very useful resource for teaching information and digital literacy. The idea of A to G is brilliant and inspirational! I think the break-down steps of each aspect can be truly helpful for students to understand what exactly they're looking for in terms of author, bias, or currency (and soon more). For teachers, each aspect could be introduced and focused in each topic or project, and the posters can serve as visual prompt in classroom.

'We do not need to teach creativity, but rather inspire its daily practice.' This opening sentence is intriguing yet inspiring to me. As said in the title, this article introduces 18 apps to support students developing creativity at different thinking stages. The writer also suggests some practical strategies which could be incorporated in our daily teaching practice. Nevertheless, what strikes me more is the reminder that we, as a class, school, or community, need to build a culture of trust in the first place to cultivate culture of creativity and innovation.

What a great article about creativity.  What I loved is that the article states that schools do not need to teach creativity.  Schools need to foster it by providing students a safe place to take risks and providing them tools that make that risk taking possible.  Creativity is about finding solutions to problems using one's own ideas and thinking skills.  Students can do this when given the power and opportunities to do so.

Like Chris, the opening to this post caught my eye. "We do not need to teach creativity, but rather inspire its daily practice." Ms. Darrow's article captures the importance of creating a school that values it's students, encourages them to take some risks, and lets them practice these skills with abandon. With support and coaching from teachers, students can work through the steps outlined in this article using technology to streamline the process, help them develop real life/career skills, and appeal to their interest in digital media. I like how Darrow labels this process; there are clear steps to increase understanding. Collaboration or group work can use this format as well, group members' jobs are easily created with the resulting structure. It also creates natural places to scaffold the process for individualizing learning in a classroom full of all kinds of learners. Each activity we do in a class may not need all these steps and some may need more, but I plan to keep this article in mind as I tweak my courses this summer.

"The digital tools offer students new opportunities, no doubt, but they still need to be intentional in the way that they craft their pieces of digital writing."  This quote sums this article well.  Despite the new technology, teachers and students must be intentional in the ways they approach writing.  The article discusses Troy Hick's book Crafting Digital Writing.  The book looks very interesting.  Part of the article also discusses some of the arguments against digital writing with Tony's counter arguments.  There are also some great links within the article to various writing resources.

Student debate has the capacity to both deeply engage the students in relevant learning, and to encourage students to be deep thinkers. Debate is more than simply arguing. It has structure and rules that are designed to keep both sides calm.

This article highlights the academic and intellectual benefits of student debate activities. According to the article, students who study and practice debate are able to think more deeply and critically and defend their opinions with evidence--definitely elements of HOTS.

This article discusses 5 technology tools to help teachers incorporate differentiated instruction into any lesson. These tools appeal to different learning styles and individual strengths. Advanced students can be challenged and struggling students can receive help. The 5 programs/tools cited are Museum Box, The Elements, Garage Band, Intro to Math, and Dragon Dictation.

Each of the apps listed in this article deserve a glance, some especially for the younger grades and special education. Garage Band appeals to all ages - my colleague uses it to set poems to music in her 2nd grade class. I hope to have students use it this year as background to a video. The Elements app is awesome! (I just spent an hour checking it out - I was completely swept away and so not focused on the task at hand.) I can also imagine an group project with Museum Box, that would appeal to the ultra-organized students. This article really showcases just how technology and all the ensuing apps has something for every student to latch on to and feel success with.

There are some amazing tools listed on these sites, including a Mind42 map of Web 2.0 Tools. I can see that my map is quite lacking compared to these. But, now I have an idea as to what to aim for. It would be great to set my students loose of some of these tools. "If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow." (John Dewey). This has been one of my favourite quotes along with "We need to prepare our students/children for jobs that have not been created yet" (Unknown). For me, they sum up what we as teachers need to strive for and that we need to keep on trying to stretch ourselves and our students...after all, we are 13% of the way through the 21st Century. It's exciting.

This blog article has provided a wide range of tools for students from the elementary to the graduate research level. I think it's worth some time exploring the materials & tools suggested and find the ones that meet your purpose.

This article made me think of some of our discussion topics this week about blogging and how it engages students. I had wondered about the use of threaded discussions rather than a blog. However, this article focuses on how students preferred the blogging. They felt an online discussion was more academic whereas blogging allowed students to engage with their learning by applying to their existing lives and knowledge base. Students felt they could develop their own voice and create a more meaningful sense of community with their online classmates. I thought this was interesting because I have used both forms in my VHS and f2f classes. I really find the threaded discussions to be more productive, but it appears that students feel the blogging is more productive. I will need to rethink my tools.

This article provides (as it says) over 100 different tips on how to use Google as a search engine in a way that can get you around blocked websites, or to glean search results that are refined to what you are specifically looking for. I included this article as it seems useful when building a blog, to structure search links and topic links in a way that will result in the consumer of the blog obtaining the content they are looking for. As the article begins, time is precious. As an educator, I need my time in class (and outside if class) to be structured in a way where I can access information easily and quickly and teach students to do so as well. These 102 tips for how to use Google are the tools in the toolbag I believe are necessary to bring this need to fruition. As stated above, the relevance to Blogs is providing useful tips on the Blog for users to utilize to refine searches and yield more meaningful results. These "tricks" would also serve well for a Blog on how to search the Internet!

I was looking for an article that had to do with blogs, but ran across this article and while it isn't on blogs - our topic for the week, it might help answer a question that has come up in discussion. The where-when-why to use blogs in the classroom question. This post talks about building expectations for a classroom as a group, teacher and student together. Why not do this with blogs? We have all said that they have value in the classroom - maybe the students can help us figure out where they would get the most value from them in their work/assignments. She contrasts that with a syllabus that "perform[s] as a living, negotiated document." (p. 41) It begins with these four questions: What topics or areas are of greatest interest to us as a class? How can we adapt the classroom space to be conducive to cultivating enhanced communication? How can we best connect our readings and discussions to our everyday lives?

This article outlines the notion of flipping the classroom to ensure there is more time in class "doing" your discipline and working on skills together, rather than "listening" or "looking" at how it is done. Being selective about what media you ask students to consume for HW, having them do blogs or discussion posts as HW and then using class time to work in groups and go deeper with the analysis of bias, perspective, sourcing, etc. is a great model. If we want to push the thinking further on the media literacy, we need to have class time to do this work with them.

This article, written by EDUDEMIC author, Jeff Dunn, offers 5 distinct reasons why schools need to move toward Digital Textbooks/ebooks as opposed to traditional paper books/texts. He begins by adding support to his stance by citing Ed Secretary, Arne Duncan's call to make "textbooks obsolete". Among Dunn's reasons and pertinent to our Media/Inform Literacy discussion are these ideas: Using digital texbooks or ebooks on line, allows for students to interact with the book. Some books have videos, highlighting/notetaking features, moveable models and interactive diagrams. In addition, such technological books are more immediate-they are simply accessed by the press of a button. Arne Duncan also remarked that the US is lagging behind other countries in converting to these computerized books. With states desiring a lead position in education in the US, and Obama's push (Connect Ed) campaign to have all schools connected (internet/computer/tech), this transition to Digital Text/ebooks seems a likely probability-and exciting one too. Though sitting back, especially in a beach chair, with a paper book still holds an appeal for me.

Technical.ly Philly reporters Juliana Reyes and Thomas Creedon contributed to this report. The lines between digital literacy and adult education are blurring. Today at Congreso , the well-regarded North Philadelphia nonprofit that has served its Latino community for 40 years, digital literacy is part of just about every adult education course.

I'm not sure whether Steve wanted an article on information/media literacy in the sense of evaluating news content, but I've interpreted it here as multimedia literacy, or digital literacy in the information age. This article is just another example of the reason I wanted to take this course in the first place: these days, digital literacy is essential.

Heteronyms (also known as heterophones or homographs) are words that are spelled the same, but have different pronunciations and different meanings.

My Carnigie's story maker is an excellent tool that can be used for teaching creative writing to your students. With this tool, students will be able to create a story in minutes, with animation if desired, and then share their story with somebody else or even create a print out.  My Carnigie Story Maker is extremely user friendly and students can get started within minutes and won't need much training to do so.  Students will be able to get their creative juices flowing as they practice their English Language skills and if you happen to be a Foreign Language teacher, this site would be great for your students as well.

VocabularySpellingCity provides the following sets of correlations to standards: U.S. Standards by State Common Core Standards for each States' Implementation Australian Standards by State Canadian Standards by Province English National Curriculum Standards