The ABCs of 2.0

One of my students posted a great list of the applications she had been exploring. She is truly a librarian among librarians!

WIKI week

I am teaching an online course at Salem State College on Emerging Technologies for School Libraries and I want to remind myself for next time to have the students make their wikis PUBLIC! I have spent a goodly portion of this evening scrounging around sending access requests. Or if they want their wikis private I need to make granting me permission part of the assignment! Live and learn...

New Teacher 2.0

Hi New Teacher Cohort!

Welcome to the lightning fast overview of web 2.0 for educators. I am going to run through a handful of online applications that can be utilized in learning communities. If you want to learn more about these tools, check with your buildings Media Specialist. There is also an online course that looks at these in-depth that will (hopefully) be offered this summer through Beverly Schools.

Our first tool is Gmail. Yep, a plain old email account. Why am I showing you this? Well, because right now your work email is currently being run through squirrel mail. (I am not being mean, this is really what it is called.) You have my deepest sympathies. With Gmail you can have your work email (and up to 4 other accounts) imported into one easily managed page. You also have a short-cut to signing in to other google applications. And finally, they have an amazing search capability that means that you never have to spend precious time searching for that email that you just can't remember where you put. Google is taking over the world - why wait? Hop on now...

Next up are wikis. Wiki is just a strange sounding name for "instant website". (It is a Hawaiian word meaning "fast".) You have probably heard of the big momma of all wikis, wikipedia. They are also incredibly useful for classroom work. You can view Wiki's in Plain English which handily explains them. You can also look at this list of links to educational wikis. Wikis can be used in the classroom and also for organization.

Social Bookmarking has a number of uses. The most obvious is the convenience of having all your bookmarks in the same place. This place, for me, is delicious. You can just visit the site, or if you have a dedicate computer you can download the very convenient tabs. The other is the handiness of the tags. These words allow you to find websites that you have tagged based on how you defined them when you put them on your delicious site. Lee LeFever also has a Social Bookmarking in Plain English film.

RSS is a way of getting subscriptions to blogs and websites. They are all brought to a comon page, like google reader, so that you can acces them all at once and don't have to go searching for updates. Common Craft also has an introduction to RSS in Plain English.

Flickr is a fantastic photo hosting site with many educational benefits. If you want more you can check out these links about flickr.

Blogs are incredibly versatile for classroom use. You can take a look at Blogs in Plain English to see what they are and then hop over to this list of educational blogs to see them in action.

If we manage to cover all these tools and still have time left - we can take a look at twitter. I am still trying to brainstorm a classroom use for it so if you have any ideas, let me know. For now, it is just fun! Twitter in Plain English tells you why...

FLICKR!

media connetion
Originally uploaded by barbfecteau

I learned so much today just playing around with flickr! There are tons of really fun things you can do with it. But first we have to slog through explaining it and setting it up. Don't let me get distracted by any shiny objects along the way! I read a chapter of BLOGS WIKIS, PODCASTS AND OTHER POWERFUL WEB TOOLS FOR CLASSROOMS by Will Richardson and I highly recommend it. I am going to upload the flickr chapter onto the BHS Library website. If you like it you might want to think about purchasing the book. It is an excellent tech guide for teachers.

And now on to flickr!

No cute little movie about how flickr works today. Rather I will walk you through some of the features, then we will sign up. There is a slighty less cute than usual movie and then you will know how to sign up for a flickr account. Once you are in we will upload some pictures and look at what flickr allows you to do with them. After that we are off to more fun with image generators! I have some good flickr links in my delicious [Use flickr as your search tag!], they are almost all lifted from the Richardson chapter. I will post them below as well.

Here are some links to explore. As usual, your assignment is to play with these links for a half hour...

Classroom uses of flickr

Jane Goodall's Camp on Flickr

What can we do on flickr? On flickr!

Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr Tools Collection (not all educational)

Hi Everyone!

Looks like thie RSS is not as fun as delicious...

RSS and Social Bookmarking - Staying on top of it all!

RSS feeds and Social Bookmarking are excellent ways of organizing your online life.

For social bookmarking, we will look at del.icio.us. We will view a little film about social bookmarking, then I will show you my account and the different features and uses for it. The main ideas behind delicious are public access and tagging. After we look at the site we will sign you up!

Next we will look at a film about RSS feed. They allow you to get website updates sent directly to you. I will show you my reader and point out some features. We will talk about uses and the we will sign you up!

I will also, if time permits, show you a couple tools (stumbleupon and technorati) for beefing up your feeds and delicious, should they need beefing.

Blogging in the Classroom

Let's start with this excellent apologia from Gordon Brune - a fifth grade teacher and blogger.

Without a doubt, the nature of literacy is changing in our society. Blogs, a journal style website that combines text, images, and links to other web pages, are one new technology that has played a large role in reshaping our literate environment. Blogs are beginning to appear in large numbers in schools, and the rationale for their use in school is numerable:

• Blogs provide a space for us to share opinions and learning with multiple communities.
• Blogs foster ownership and choice.
• Blogs provide a worldwide audience, compelling and motivating us to share our thoughts, opinions, and learning.
• Blogs provide an archive of our learning over time, facilitating reflection and learning.
• Blogs provide an opportunity for collective and collaborative learning.
• Blogs are interactive by nature, thus creating enthusiasm and for writing and communication and engagement in conversation and learning.
• Blogs provides the opportunity to discuss responsible public writing. We can learn about the power of the published word and the responsibilities involved with public writing.

Blogs in Plain English show a nice overview.

blogger.com is the spot for all my blogging needs!

Classblogmeister is the brainchild of David Warlick - you have to attend one if his seminars to use it but it is a nice place to look at blogs and it allows teachers to completely control student blogging.

Here is a huge clearinghouse of sites on educational blogging.
If you just want to look at classroom blogs then this is the direct link. This includes a kindergarten blog, a fifth grade class blog, an online "refrigerator door", and a high school blog where students put up the content.