thinking 2.0 » Web 2.0 tools

Searchme visual search

msbarnsley — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:56:00 +0000

Listed in Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2008, Searchme is an “engine that displays results not in the usual text-list format (that’s so Google), but as a slick image gallery of actual Web pages you can flip through and filter results by topic.” Below is a search of “Ken Robinson”.

Students speak out

msbarnsley — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:32:35 +0000

There has been lots of discussion about realising student participation in the edublogosphere in the past year. Driven be a belief that students “should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners”, Clay Burrell and others have helped students set up Student 2.0, a blog that is “administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view, Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.”

Flickr Fun

msbarnsley — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:41:30 +0000

Joyce Valenza, of School Library Journal, has linked to heaps of visual tools. In Part 1: Flagrant Disregard’s Flickr tools for creating book covers and movie posters, Spell with Flickr, Graffiti Creator and comic strip generator ToonDoo.
My favourite by far is the Hockneyizer, where you can create a unique photo collage in the style of British artist David Hockney.

xtimeline – could it make timelines interesting?

msbarnsley — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:28:10 +0000

History is one of my passions in life, but I’ve never found timelines very interesting activities. This could all change with xtimeline, which helps you create a timeline on any subject and multiple users can add information and still images to an ongoing project. You can set up privacy settings to moderate who can contribute, view or comment on a timeline. Below is a photo of a Vietnam War timeline found the site, but I’m more interested in getting students to create their own. We are about to start looking at Decolonisation on Indochina in Senior History so this could be another useful tool for students.

Another open source timeline application is available as part of the MIT SIMILE project, but it looks much, much harder; in fact, it looks too hard.

WikiMindMap

msbarnsley — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:51:07 +0000

WikiMindMap produces a mindmap view of Wikipedia content. According to the developers, it “is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages in large public wikis, such as wikipedia, have become rich and complex documents. Thus, it is not allways straight forward to find the information you are really looking for. This tool aims to support users to get a good structured and easy understandable overview of the topic you are looking for.”

This tool has the potential to help students overcome the “information overload” syndrome by presenting information in a mind map format, which could be great for visual learners. All you have to do is type in a key term, event etc. and the (online) program creates a dynamic mindmap with links to sections in wikipedia. I typed in World War I and the following mind map appeared. I don’t know if I’d use this initially with students as the process of creating a mind map helps them to make connections and develop causal reasoning skills about content they are studying, whereas WikiMindMap does all the work. It could be good for revision or to help navigate the massive amount of information on wikipedia.

Video, video and more video

msbarnsley — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:05:57 +0000

Mashable has created an incredible list of video tools. There are more than 150 links to a whole range of video resources including live video, online video how-to, online video editors, online video converters, video sharing, video hosting, video organization and management, vidcasts & vlogging, video mashups, mobile video apps, video search and online TV.

Wikis in plain English

msbarnsley — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:20:20 +0000

Another great video from thecommoncraft show.

Still don’t get RSS?

msbarnsley — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:46:13 +0000

This is a great, three-minute video from the Common Craft Show that explains what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is and how and why you should use it.

If you switch to Flock as your web browser, you can avoid Step 2, which tells you how to set up a reader or aggregator (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines etc) to collect your news from blogs or news sites. If you use Flock, it has built in news or feed reader. All you have to do is hit the RSS symbol

and all the news comes to you.

Free web tools for educators

msbarnsley — Sun, 20 May 2007 10:55:58 +0000

“Flock is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.”

I have been using a web browser (Safari or Firefox) called Flock for a couple of months. It is an easy way to keep track of changes made to your class blogs and wikis as it has a RSS aggregator built in. It also has bookmark syncing with del.icio.us, WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools and Flickr support.

This is the best tool for searching, blogging, shared bookmarks and shared photos.
Switching to Flock from Firefox, Safari is also easy. Flock imports all of your cookies, saved passwords, bookmarks and browsing history.
Read these reviews by Paul Stamatiou and Wired to find out more

Flickr – Flickr is a social photo sharing site. Additionally, you can search for Creative Commons images that teachers and students can legally have the rights to use in their work.

pbWiki & WikiSpaces – A Wiki is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most content very quickly and easily. A very useful and user-friendly collaborative learning tool.

Class website
Online multimedia “textbook” – Course materials/assessment
Group editing enables projects with other classes or schools
Research
Group or individual assessment project
Parents can see students’ work

Wikispaces is giving away 100,000 ad-free wikis to educators and I switched from pbwiki for this reason. It has a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that supports embeddable media (YouTube or Google Video).

Edublogs – Weblogs – Online journals (blogs): A powerful tool for writing and communicating. Teachinghacks.com has a guide on using weblogs in education, which lists the following uses for blogs in the classroom:

1. use blogs for real-world writing experiences

2. prolong discussions outside the classroom or for question and answer

3. easily include discussions with authors or guest speakers

4. quickly give feedback to students, and students to each other (no stacks of paper)

5. track student writing development

6. encouraging students to help each other with their writing

7. create a classroom newsletter by using a multi-user blog for the different topics. I.E. classroom trips, sports, upcoming trips …

8. create a school website with sections that can be easily updated

9. students using peer networks to develop their own knowledge

10. update new information such as homework and assignments

1) Del.icio.us – My students and I use this social bookmarking engine to store our favourite sites online, so that they can be accessed on any computer. Fantastic if your computer dies, which happened to me recently. Luckily, all my bookmarks were stored on del.ici.ous so I did not have to go back find all the sites it took months to find. This is a fantastic research tool for students because students can share their bookmarks and subscribe to other people’s favourites so that you can refine you web searches on particular subjects by checking pages other researchers tagged as useful. If thousands of other people have saved a page on WWI as a favourite, there’s a fair chance that it will be useful.

To read more about it, check out this informative article at PBS’ Learning Source.