Web 2.0 and Education

After watching the Jing presentations on all of the exciting (and free) Web 2.0 tools, I’m glad that we get an opportunity this week to reflect on what we’ve learned and think of possibilities of how we can implement these in our own classrooms and how we can share these resources with others.  I remember last spring when I took Foundations of Educational Technology, I was so excited about the opportunities and tried some of them in my classroom.  Again, this spring I’m fortunate enough to get to try these in my classroom as I learn about them.

I have already shared with others that Animoto is a great tool for photo slideshows, and I plan to share it with my Multimedia class this spring.  Voki and Blabberize are easy programs that I also plan to share with my Multimedia class.  I think Jing is a great tool that I wish that I had found a long time ago!  I will definitely be using it.  I may even use some of these fun programs as a teaser to my Computer Applications class to get them interested in taking Web Design and Multimedia.

Besides Multimedia, I’ve learned about several other tools that I plan on implementing into my other classes—Personal Finance and General Business.  CoboCards, the electronic flash cards, will be a great resource for any class.  I plan to use Bitstrip in Personal Finance and General Business.  I will give each student a small topic and have them create a strip to explain or demonstrate the topic.  Awesome Highlighter is another resource that I want to try; I want to see if I’d rather use it than copying and pasting into Word like I do now.  Also, I’ve just begun to use Evernote, but I like what I see so far and believe that it would be a great way to store information online so that it is available wherever I am.

Other Web 2.0 resources that some of my classmates have mentioned that I’d like to explore more are Prezi  and Online Converter.  I have done a little research on each of them.   I am going to set up Prezi and try it. It is not slide by slide like a PowerPoint presentation, but more like a whiteboard.  I have been in need of the online converter to convert images, audio, etc. from one format to another, so I will definitely be bookmarking it.

It is so exciting to have so many new resources!