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Web 2.0 Tools
The Edutopia Five Minute Film Festival provides links to a dozen quick tutorials for useful free Web 2.0 tools for the classroom. They include: Storybird, VoiceThread, Pinterest, Dropbox, Animoto, and more. Although I have experience using most of the tools, the tutorials still provide useful tips for using these in the classroom. For example, the Twitter tutorial provides instructions for sending Tweets directly to cell phones. This is a free reminder system for students and parents. I’ve been using Evernote for over a year, but it might be a useful tool for sharing information with students and parents. Once into a tutorial, it’s easy to go directly into Youtube and look for additional tutorials on the same tools and find new ideas.I have a subscription to Glogster. I don’t use it with the students, though. It is only accessible on the computer, since it relies on Flash, which makes it unfriendly to iPads.
Will Richardson’s chapter on social Networks emphasizes that young people today access social networks very frequently. Not only do young people use social networks to interact with others, they also use them to explore and research and share their personal interests. They learn from these interactions effectively teaching and learning outside of school. Facebook is quickly becoming popular with the older folks. A newer social network, which younger folks are adopting, is Ning. This network is organized around common interests. Social Networks emphasize collaboration and communication over competition. Richardson makes the case that whether we like it or not, our youth is accessing Facebook and similar social networks. As educators, we need to use these tools for own use so we can understand what our students are doing. How would we utilize these tools for our students to communication and digital citizenship? We would need to respect professional boundaries while using Facebook with students. Teachers are not friends, and we need to respect the privacy of the students and not expose them to our personal lives as well. A class Facebook page could be created that would be a closed group. The class could use this to share links and comments. The advantage of this over a class blog would be that students would be on Facebook anyway, and it would be more attractive for them to use it as a familiar tool. Ning, which is another social network, is self contained. It can be private. Teachers can have administrative rights to approve posts. With all the possible tools, it's important to be selective. It seems to me, that if a class that is already using kidblog,org, there doesn't seem to be a need to add an additional tool like these.
My Experiences with Web 2.0 Tools
Nothing that I do with media and tech comes easy to me. There are so many tools that I have difficulty deciding what to use. Once I use a tool, I have to figure out how to make the different tools work with each other. If I had older students, maybe they would be able to experiment and find solutions to these conundrums. In the meantime, I’m spinning my wheels as I go.
Here are a few examples of my experiences with Web 2.0 tools: I used Kidblog.org and Explain Everything in the classroom with 7-8 year old girls. We were working on story elements and History, linking these with the Purim holiday. The students drew pictures of Esther and the Purim story. I asked them to take pictures of their pictures and either post them on their blogs or start creating a project in Explain Everything. We weren’t able to post the pictures and videos on Kidblog from the iPads. In addition, anything that was on one iPad in Explain Everything was not available to the other devices. We needed a plug-in on kidblog to access the media on the iPads. I didn’t have the expertise to determine how to do that. We also needed a way to save media on Explain Everything so we would be able to share it with each other. I was able to upload pictures from my iPad and a short video to my Google drive. It took some work to find where they went. I took my questions to my colleagues on my PLN in Twitter. Previously, when I asked questions this way, I didn’t get responses. This time, I was already in conversation with a local Jewish educator. He used Explain Everything to flip his Prophets class. He didn’t know the answer to my question, but other folks on our shared network of educators took up the conversation. We resolved the issue in part, and I was able to continue with my work.
I wanted to play with Animoto, so I took a 6 second video that I had saved in Google Drive, downloaded onto my computer, and edited it in Windows Movie Maker. Then I imported it into Animoto. I didn’t have a free teacher account because I didn’t have a school email. Rather than paying a fee, I created a sample 30 second video and was able to embed it on my class kidblog. I wondered if I was making extra work for myself, or if this was the only way to make the different tools talk to each other.
I’ve been using Evernote for over a year. It’s a perfect tool for taking notes and setting up reminders. I would recommend it to students as a time management and note taking tool. It requires an email address, however, which some students don’t have access to.
A Web 2.0 Tool for Critical Thinking and Youth Activism
Richardson introduced a Social Networking site designed to help the less fortunate called TakingIt Global.org, I decided to investigate Takingitglobal to find out more about what they did and who they were. I was particularly interested in finding out if they had any kind of bias or agenda which was in conflict with my personal values. The home page was attractive and inviting. It used a tag line of “Inspire, Inform, Involve.” The site stated that it was designed to encourage young people from 15-30 years of age to be activists. Being Jewish, I looked to see there there was any reference to Jews or Israel. There was an article about the Israeli delegation to the U.N taking part in the U.N. Human Rights organization. There was an online video link on the topic of violence in activism, questioning whether it was justified or not. I couldn’t find any link to an archived video. I found that the site was supported by the U.N., Oxfam, and Greenpeace. These organizations had a record of discrimination against Israel. Although Arabic was featured as an option, I didn’t see any Hebrew on the site. After investigating this site, I would recommend that Jewish students access it and explore it carefully. I would even recommend that they take advantage of the resources found there, and use them to communicate and connect with other young people. I would caution Jewish youth to be on guard while there, and to be on the lookout for anti-semitism.(Here is a link to a Wikipedia article on the site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TakingITGlobal.)
After reviewing tigweb.org, I sent the link to my collaborators on the Smart Choices Project curriculum. I suggested that they investigate it. It would be a resource for the program for our Jewish students to communicate with other young people globally who were activists. This would a practical experience in critical thinking and determining bias, with an authentic and current audience of peers.
Resources:
This is a tool for creating interactive videos that engage learners:
This is a blog post on two apps that can be used for reading comprehension:
Video making made easy:
Second Life: A college student reviews the pros and cons of Second Life, and decides that although it IS a social network, it takes up too much time, and she prefers her first life:
Twitter in the classroom: instructions for setting up mobile notifications for students:
References:
Richardson, Will, “Social Networks: Facebook, Ning, connections, and Communities”, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Third Edition (Kindle version), Corwin, 2010
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