The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
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- One week until #GTAUK
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- Motivation comes from within.
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5 Web 2.0 Apps that every teacher should know about
61 CommentsI should imagine that a fair few visiting this site will have heard the term ‘Web 2.0′ being bandied about without fully knowing what it means. Let me show you what it means in a very practical way… :D
The entry on Web 2.0 at Wikipedia defines it as:
Web 2.0 is a term popularized by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International as the name for a series of web development conferences that started in October 2004. It has since come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997). They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis. To some extent Web 2.0 has become a buzzword, incorporating whatever is newly popular on the Web (such as tags and podcasts). A consensus on its exact meaning has not yet been reached.
So Web 2.0 is a fairly ‘fuzzy’ way of lumping together web applications which focus on collaboration and more asynchonous technology (i.e. you don’t have to refresh the whole page for parts of it to be updated).
There’s a plethora of Web 2.0 apps, a great number of which are collated at various sites which attempt to list them according to category. As this is a teaching-related blog, I’m going to focus on five of which may be useful to those involved in education… :)
Rollyo is short for ‘Roll Your Own’ and is a customisable search engine. The idea is that you define the sites which students can use to get results. Thus you are ‘rolling your own’ search engine which ring-fences the information which students have access to. This can be useful for both cutting down on the huge amounts of information students may have to wade through, and also to protect young people from offensive and dangerous ideas and content on the Internet.
Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org are all well and good when you want to work individually on some kind of word-processing or presentation task, but what about when you want to collaborate? Granted each has (limited) features enabling you to send documents back and forth with notes about revisions, etc. but more is needed. That’s where the recently-acquired-by-Google Writely comes in. Writely allows you not only to import any documents in popular formats, but to work in real-time with a number of collaborators, making brainstorming and team document-creation a breeze!
Powerpoint is perhaps the most badly-used application in the known universe. Feature-creep has meant that the world and his dog adds unnecessary animations and garish colour schemes to even the most simple of presentations. Sometimes what is needed is to strip this away and get back to brass tacks using a simple and straighforward presentation-creation tool. Thumbstacks allows you to do just this plus share your presentation easily. It looks very promising.
For those who have taken the plunge and started blogging with their students, keeping track of their posts and comments can be quite an ordeal. Suprglut allows you to create, in essence, a ‘blog of blogs’, aggregating the feeds of a great number of blogs of your choice into one easy-to-use page.
Finally, no Web 2.0 roundup would be complete without some mention of wikis. This is still a growing area, with the current wiki platform of choice – PBWiki – being challenged by the likes of Wikispaces and the soon-to-be-released, AJAX-powered Wetpaint. For those who aren’t aware of the function or power of wikis, they are a quick and easy way of collaboratively making a website through editorial control resting in the hands of users. For more about wikis, visit Wikipedia.
Published on March 17, 2006 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
61 Responses to “5 Web 2.0 Apps that every teacher should know about”
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I know this post is old, but I think the Google custom search engine is better than Rollyo, if you can handle its higher complexity. I guess you think so too (I noticed the edublogosphere search).
I created a lesson plan custom search engine, at lessonseek.com, using Google’s tool, and I like it a lot.
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Thanks Rafael – I just wanted to demarcate the two. Rollyo was around before Google Custom search and I haven’t had the time (or seen the need, to be honest) to switch the site-based search. :)
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