Volume 2, Issue 1, April 2006
|
by James McConville
|
||
by Mike Ireland |
||
by Wayne Ulian |
||
by Kevin Ambroe |
||
by Jolene Mergens and Chris Rozitis |
||
by Dennis Wong |
||
by James McConville |
||
by Shelley Wilcox |
||
by Tracy Kimoto |
||
by James McConville |
||
by CUE-Van Executive |
||
by CUE Executive |
||
by CUE Executive |
||
by CUE Executive |
||
by James McConville |
||
By James McConville, Staff Development Coordinator, School District 43 (Coquitlam)
What is Web 2.0? Does it matter to me at school? What does it allow my student to do? If you have any of these questions then you aren’t alone in wondering where this term came from and, more importantly, what it means to educators.
In the simplest technical terms, Web 2.0 is the read-write web. Compared to what we now call Web 1.0 of the internet it was solely ‘read-only’. In other words, if you wanted to look up some information you went to a site and read the information. There was no place to leave a comment or to personalize the information. What you saw is what you got.
Take this example. A social studies teacher is looking for earthquake information in a specific area. In the past they probably visited a government geological website that posted location and magnitude of earthquakes in a specific location. You read the information in the format they had designed for you.
Now let’s look at the same example in a Web 2.0 lens. A company that fully epitomizes Web 2.0 is Google. They have numerous FREE tools that educators can use in the classroom. One of these applications is Google Earth. Download from http://earth.google.com/ in versions for either PC and MAC. To continue the earthquake example Google Earth has a layer called earthquakes. See image below.
When you check that box and zoom to an altitude below 100 miles you’ll see an image like this one from Hawaii.
Take a few minutes to explore some of the other layers available. My personal favorites are: 3D buildings (amazing for New York), Community Showcase >> webcams (really amazing for ground zero). Essentially multiple organizations are writing information that anyone can read through a tool like Google Earth. Read-write Web2.0!!
The next tool I’d recommend for educators is to try social bookmarking with students. Have you ever tried to publish lists of links to websites? If you put them on paper, many students will have difficulty typing them in correctly and they can’t be updated and edited without reprinting. Luckily for us, an innovative company has created an amazing (and FREE) tool called del.icio.us. What del.icio.us does it provide a place where you can store all your favourite links. Then you simply need to give students that one address and they can see all the sites that you bookmarked for them.
The features of del.icio.us don’t end there. As you post links to del.icio.us make sure to tag the items with as many categories as apply to your links. These tags can be used to sort the sites into categories for easier browsing.
Here is an example of how del.icio.us works. My site is: http://del.icio.us/jmcconville in the image below the tags are displayed. In this case they are sorted by the frequency that they are used. In other words ‘education’ is used the most followed by podcast and so on.
Clicking on the word ‘podcast’ give the list of sites that I’ve tagged related to podcasting. It also has its own web URL http://del.icio.us/jmcconville/podcast . Imagine a class where all students and the teacher setup a del.icio.us account. They can then be cross-linked using the inbox feature. This would provide a very collaborative way to share sites related to whatever topic the class was studying.
I would appreciate feedback to any of these topics. Feel free to email me at: jmcconville@sd43.bc.ca
