Teachers face a world where more and more students (and more and more businesses) make use of the online world, especially Web 2.0. In order to support teaching and learning, teachers can use any number of easy and free web applications, but we need to know what's available to us and to our students. Because the web is overwhelming huge, this can often be intimidating.
In this wiki, I start by showing some essential, simple, and free Web 2.0 school tools, on this page. On other pages I explain the strategy I use to keep up with Web 2.0 developments relevant to teaching and learning. I call this strategy -
Before going through these strategies, we'll look at some of the available webapps (Web applications) that are useful school tools.
Wikis
This website is a wiki; it's free because it's an educational wiki. I created it without using any HTML code or Wiki Markup Language; I just typed, and added links, images and videos. (You do have to learn a few steps, but they're straightforward.) Here's what my editing screen looks like:
You can move from page to page in this wiki by choosing links in the bar to the right
Here is a voice thread explaining how to use VoiceThread. You can see my image on the left of the screen, halfway down, where I added a comment. You can write a comment or record one. Many ESL teachers are using this easy, free Web 2.0 application with their students.
Audacity: Recording and Editing Audio
Audacity is a free downloadable audio recorder and editor - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ It's available for Windows, Macs, or Linux.
Teachers can use Audacity to create and edit audio. The files can be made into MP3s and linked to a wiki or web site, or emailed as attachments. It's fairly easy to use and there are online tutorials available
from TeacherTube, an under 10 minute video that gives you a sense of how it works -
Writing and posting in a blog can be a way for students to share what they're learning and see what others are learning. Here are two very easy, and, of course, free ones:
Posterous - http://posterous.com/ - which is even easier because you can post to by emailing to post@posterous.com and if you attach pictures or MP3s to the email, they appear in the post.
Academic and Report Writing Made Easier
Here are three ways to make writing papers or reports easier:
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.