Scott Freed’s Wicked Cool Web 2.0 Blog

Well camper, here we are.  The end of 23 Things.  It’s been good.  I stand buy my statement that we are not necessarily breaking new ground here but simply greasing the wheels to a point where things happen much faster.  Wher it used to be that you did group projects inside of your classroom now that can happen outside, ot only of your classroom but of your country.  Still we cannot ignore that our kids are using technology in ways we never dreamed of and to ignore its place in their lives and stick to old ways is to become irrlevant to them.  It will not be long before paper textbook are gone (and with good reason probably).  Learning will happen almost enclusively on the net and we need to educate them for that reality.  Otherwise we risk them growing up not ignorant of technology and its good uses, but only knowledgable of its quick and easy methods of cheating, paguerism, and more.  Great class, Shelley.  I’ll see you next week to go over my list of tech learning ideas.

Okay, I’m going off the beaten path here and writing about something on my reader that has little to do with education…well maybe.  By far my favorite blog that I’ve signed up for this summer is Zen Habits.  It’s great.  I’ve found lots of ideas for simplifying life so you can enjoy it more.  They talk about everything there from exercise and eating to work, and their most hated item–the e-mail inbox.  It seems there are tons of posts about managing your e-mail so you don’t get bogged down in it.  It’s made me think though that this web 2.0 concept is very Zen in and of itself.  What are we doing here but simplifying the connections between people and information, simplifying the connections between people and each other so that our learning can happen more quickly and efficiently and free up more of our time to simply enjoy life.  Cool thing, eh?

The soical networking portals are one of the biggest features of Web 2.0.  They are probably the most difficult to create and hence, seem to be a collaborative effort to create and maintain.  Creating a network for your students seems to obvious use and it seems to have been done by some according to some of the posts on Classroom 2.0.  That’s getting pretty crazy for me.  I did like many of the discussions posted in there where people shared ideas and the like.

We use a social networking feature for cross country athletes through a site called Flotrack.org.  Their Flotrakr feature lets kids create their own page like Facebook.  We created a team site their and the kids joined it.  It includes the ability to send messages, post videos, make friends with people, etc.  We use it because they log their summer training on it and as members of our team we can see what they are doing and how they are feeling.  It’s worked well and we’ve been able to catch and correct some injuries before they get too bad.  Pretty good use IMHO.

Wow!  That is pretty crazy.  So pageflakes is pretty much the same as iGoogle with sharing.  I can see the obvious uses in education being the creation of a shared class homepage for students to find, share, add, etc. related content/ widgets about their class.  I can see this being a bit too much for any but the most devoted students to the subject matter from my experiences, but would definitely see AP kids going nuts for this thing.  Since you can add literally anything to it,the possibilities are endless as far as what you do with it.  Again, pretty cool stuff.

I can think of a bunch of ways to use Google Doc Apps.  Beyond just sharing things I create with my kids (Word docs, Power Points, or Cross Country Spreadsheets) directly, there are others things to do as well.

This past spring I had my seniors do their final project in groups.  They used Google Docs to create their final paper.  Each member was responsible for one piece of the paper and they all had to review it and sign off on it.  Ultimately, because of the sharing feature, all they had to do was share it with me instead of printing it out and killing trees.  Google is Green.

I can see a way to use a Spreadsheet of my cross country results to share with parents on the team.  This way they can see how their athlete is doing in the races, what they need to work on, and exactly what my reasoning might be for where they are on the depth chart.  Google Docs save phone calls.

These sites are obviously one of the biggest things about the Web 2.0 concept.  They may actually be what made people recognize that something truly different was happening in how media is created.  I checked out both YouTube and TeacherTube for things.  Found some great videos of how machinery worked in the Industrial Revolution, a quick how to on the Guillotine for the French reign of Terror, and this little gem on the Moon Landing

Adding embedded videos from sites like this will make it easy to provide a quick change of pace on our blogs or websites so that kids will stay awake.

So I just recorded, converted, and published an audio file that could have been the start of a real podcast.  It took under 10 minutes to do the whole thing and that included reading directions since it was my first time using the software.  Way easy.  I can totally see sports teams doing this for a weekly update sort of thing.  If we do have cross country managers this year, they will be podcasting every week on our results and give parent news updates.  It was fun and easy.  Good stuff.

Having messed around with a proto-podcast (publsihed files but no update through RSS) I can see where this is fun for the kids.  They get a kick out of putting their stuff on the web and that kind of thing.  Actually doing a real podcast where kids are constantly pubslishing new material would be pretty time consuming.  Perhaps the thing to do would be to generally educate the kids on the technical workings invloved an then have them sign up in groups to podcast material on a given unit at some time during the year.  Pretty cool stuff.

I found Library Thing to be pretty cool and would have definitely used it back in the day when I was donig a ton of research.  Just like delicious I can see people sharing books on similar topics or something like that.  I can definitely see a use for it in an English class where kids could talk about a book they’re reading with antyone out there and get a wide array of viewpoints.  Prettg cool site.

Delicious is way cool.  I can see a number of ways to use this site.

You can get kids to share info they find when working on group projects.   A teacher can share their links with kids on a ceratin topic of interest so they can find more info about.  My wife and I actually used it to web search for a birthday present for our daughter while in different cities.  We just shared a tag for Abby_Present and found something pretty quickly.  I’ve decided to create a new account just for school related stuff since bookmarks are kind of personal and I don’t want my kids snooping around in everything I look at.

My new delicious account is… http://delicious.com/sfreed