Glossary of Terms

Resource Kit Indices

Just Added

School is Out for Web 2.0

By Dennis O’Connor

Do you hear the buzz? The new vocabulary of ed-tech talk bursts with keywords like blog, podcast, wikis, webinar and the ultimate umbrella term: Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 describes a second generation of websites where the tech literate can read, write, publish and respond to information. Blogs, wikis, podcasts and webinars are the publication tools that make it all happen.  Web 2.0, dubbed the Read/Write web by visionary educators and thinkers gives everyone with access to the Internet a truly international voice. (By last count a billion people are online.)

Yesterday we could use search engines, subject indexes and the deep web to locate, evaluate, and use digital information. Today we can do all that while juggling a remarkably diverse set of new user friendly web based applications to capable of creating and publishing a custom tailored world of digital information. 

What’s Does Web 2.0 Mean for Educators?

Our students know more about social-networking, photo sharing, video broadcasting, music file sharing , blogging and podcasting than we do. They live online in a free range cyberspace where anything goes, while we debate the dangers and merits of technology that is evolving faster than we can sit through committee meetings. While we struggle with the weighty and truly important issues of Internet child safety,  student confidentiality, AUP’s and shaky infrastructure, our kids are swapping gossip and dreams on MySpace and producing inspired life documentaries for Google Video and YOUTube. 

With or without our help, this generation will produce poetry, music, political debate and passionate autobiographies. Web2.0 provides a publishing vehicle that gives anyone with a modicum of technical literacy an international voice. That voice can be grown, polished, and liberated in school or out.

How can we harness the power of this technology to reach the digital natives who (for the most part) feel chained to their desks and forced to stare at a chalkboard?   Big question. Here’s a one word answer: authorship. 

Web 2.0 tools allow anyone with access to the Internet to read, think, write, and publish.  This means everyone has a chance to reach a huge and authentic audience.  In the last century, the audience for most student work was the teacher. That work was created under a mandatory production order (homework, term paper, science project). The introduction of first generation web published project based learning activities with multimedia outcomes pointed the way to a larger authentic audience beyond the individual classroom (for some students in some schools).

The Web2.0 Internet now paves a road to the audience our students really want to find: everyone outside of school.   Don’t underestimate the motivational power of creating content for peer groups. As educators we are in a position to teach the technical process of Web2.0 publishing as we teach the content of our curriculums.  At the heart of the process is authorship; the creation of student confidentiality that demonstrates the knowledge and thinking of an individual or a group.

Web 2.0 Connections to Curriculum

The new authorship and communication tools offered by Web2.0 can enhance everything we want to teach in school: think, read, write, share. Authors are thinkers.  We want our students to do what authors do:

Use a research process

Develop a deep understanding of a subject.

Evaluate sources of information

Create and share knowledge

Speak to an audience

Present a well reasoned point of view.

In This Issue...

This issue of the Full Circle Resource Kit will help you make connections between your curriculum and the highly interactive publishing technologies now at hand. We suggest that you don’t really need to teach your students the mechanics of the technology. The how-to steps can be picked up along the way. Instead, put your precious time where it counts the most: teach the processes of inquiry and evaluation.

Featured Articles:

Podcast: Evaluating Blogs: Joyce Valenza Library Information Specialist for Springfield Township High School talks with Dan Balzer about a 'wonderfully rich confusion' of information. Joyce shares her insights about the rapid changes embodied by the read / write environment of Web 2.0.

Ryan Deschamps, author of  The Other Librarian Blog, tackles Web 2.0, information authority and the role of the public librarian. Ryan, e-Learning Services Manager for the Halifax Public Libraries in Halifax, Nova Scotia, shares unique insights about the self affirming nature of blogs and blogging.

Curriculum:

Doug Johnson discusses the place of Wikipedia in the research process.  We know the debate is raging in schools over the answer to Doug’s essential question: Wikipedia: Ban It or Boost it?

Action Zone Lessons: a mini teacher's guide on how to use these Action Zone Games!

Quick Pick: Web 2.0 and Bias: Tips tricks and classroom tactics for helping your students spot bias in source materials.

Action Zone:

Here you will find three new flash based learning games designed to provide practice and observation opportunities.

Blog Search Challenge: Use Technorati to search blogs for a list of the ten things coaches shout during a soccer game.

Photo Tagging Challenge: Use the Flckr photo sharing site and their tag search engine to track down the source of several 'interesting' photos.

Assessment:

Joyce Valenza provides a useful set of evaluation criteria in: Evaluation Skills in the Web 2.0 Information Landscape.   As user created content grows, it becomes more important to tune our teaching of evaluation skills to the real world resources our students will be finding

Blog Evaluation Assessment provides a rubric built on the evaluation criteria suggested by Joyce Valenza. This how-to provides a blueprint for lessons about blog evaluation.

Finding Relevant Results compares the results of several specialized blog search engines. See what can be gleaned by scanning the snippets returned by specific keywords. We discover that bigger isn't always better (or more relevant ) at least in the current world of blog searching.

Web Resources:

Web 2.0 Tools for Educators offers an annotated list of blogs, wikis, video share, photo share, and social bookmarking services. Take a guided tour of free web services and discover some useful classroom connections.

Glossary of Terms Our hyper-linked list of professional vocabulary. (It's a keyword bonanza!)

Bias, an Interactive MicroModule Companion asks the user to evaluate the bias of four news clippings taken from websites around the web.