Web 2.0 tools for teachers

I wonder if the YV Photography teachers have seen this.

One of my favorite inquiries is how the brain works with language. This book looks fascinating! "Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children's brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact. "

Listen to any song in the world for free. Create free internet radio stations. Search for free mp3's to stream.

Flockdraw is the most seamless realtime collaborative drawing tool ever.

These new readers are starting to get to what we need in the classroom. "The e-reader screen is used with a stylus that can underline or highlight text, take notes in the margin, pull up a blank piece of e-paper for solving math problems, or touch a link for a video of a chemical interaction that is then displayed on the LCD screen." I've heard predictions that even more flexible devices will be developed this coming year.

I'm trying to learn more about Zotero, and this professor, Sean Takats, suggests that he used it with a "research-intensive" class this semester: "With their unprecedented collaborative functionality, Zotero groups promise to transform the way that instructors and students interact with sources, particularly in research-intensive classes. " I wonder how it went.

I've been following this group for a while and thought I'd share my own blog with the community. It's an example of the evolution of a blogger. Please bear with me as I learn the art and improve my voice with every post. I spent 10 years blogging at the low end of the rubric before realizing there was so much more to learn.

I like all of the definitions in this blog post. They sound connected to past research, yet new. I know I was feeling odd at the "Digital Is..." Conference, because I don't want to let the technology disappear into uses. It's better, I think to look for what we can get out of particular technologies. That's what we are doing now with Google's Wave. "Alongside these discussions Frances Bell suggested the term Co-Digital as a better term to describe the process of "…seizing the opportunities presented by the newness of technologies to spot changes and then shape the development of the technology."" As this paragraph suggests, we still need to look at "digital technologies" to see how we can exploit them for what we need.

I love how this article is framed. "Still, is this shift in pedagogy and policy worth the effort? Will sound, traditional writing instruction still suffice, or do we need to reframe the way we teach students to write due to the global, online spaces they will frequent more in their lives? In an August 2009 Wired article, Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, offered her own research to suggest that students are writing in environments far removed from those from even a generation ago. "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. According to her five-year study of student writing, technology is pushing writing literacy in new directions that educators must begin to make sense of. "

Unleash your creativity and make your digital film for free!\n\nChoose a background scene, characters, animated actions, dialog,\n\nintroduction, and ending credits. Put your name as the producer\n\nand email the movie to your friends! You can also signup for free\n\nas a registered user, which gives you access to more advanced\n\nfeatures, such as being able to save or edit the movies that\n\nyou create.

dotSub is another site beyond YouTube that makes available a wealth of video resources. This one is unusual in that it offers the facility for those who upload their videos to create subtitles in any language.

Mr Picassohead is a fun website. It allows users to create their own 'Picasso' by selecting different types of faces and facial features, colours and so on and dragging them onto a canvas. It is a great way to begin a unit of work on Picasso, Cubism or abstract art with students.