This last week my students were asked to do a bit of Web 2.0 research. One part of their assignment was to list three apps that they found, liked, and can be useful in education. Their findings were wonderful and some of them are:
- Tikatok: Where Kids Write, Illustrate, and Publish Their Own Books. Isn’t this a neat concept? I think kids would want to write more because there’s a chance that somebody, and not just their parents, will read their creations AND also buy their books!
- Free Screencast: Record your screen, upload, and share with ease. There are many screencast projects out there but this, even though it’s still in beta, looks promising.
- WePapers: Find, read, and download tons of quality academic documents and notes on anything that you can study in college. After browsing a bit, it’s got some good resources. I just hope none of my student will ever think of “borrowing” one to submit for their assignments {::SMILES}.
- Meebo: Instant messaging everywhere. I’ve used this in my classroom and it’s nice. No need for students to create an account. I use to forget to log in but now Meebo has all sorts of plug-in to lessen that chance. It’s a nice app that you can easily embed in your Course Management System or website.
- PageFlake: The social personalized homepage. I’ve never used this before, I use iGoogle, but they’re both the same. Use widgets to personalize a homepage. I can see it being useful in schools. You log in to the Internet and voila, one page that has everything a student would need — if the widget exist of course {::SMILES}
- Cooking Thing: How to cook anything. I have a cookbook that can show me how to cook anything. It’s yellow, and I can’t remember who wrote it. I love it and after perusing this site, I like it too. I like how I can click on ingredients that I have and it’ll recommend some recipes based on my choices. Pretty sweet! There’s another site like this but again, I can’t remember :\
- HippoCampus: A project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge. I haven’t given this site a good browsing time but I will. It looks great and the few that I did see looks high quality — like the site promises. I didn’t see anything that I can use but if I were a history teacher, I’d be on this site for weeks trying to find something that I’d be able to use for one or two of my lesson plans!
Ok, so those above were from my students. Pretty nice, huh? From me… here’s what I have to contribute for today…
- Merlot: Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. This is similar to HippoCampus and WePapers. The difference, or some, are that in Merlot you can find lesson plans, peer review of them, and comments. There’s one big thing I don’t like. Unlike the other two sites where the material is uploaded to HippoCampus/WePapers, Merlot’s materials are link to the original sites which could be a blog, course site, etc. Some are not updated which means sometimes I’ll find a great resource but the link to the material is broken. Bummer!!
- Wordle: A toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. I think this can be a fun tool in speech for example, to see how many “uhms” or “so” one uses. In a writing class. Have children write words that starts with “th” for example. In writing, to help students not use the same word over and over again… just copy and paste, it’s that easy!
- Yahoo Pipes: A powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. One of my tools to mash-up contents. Ok so there’s FriendFeed or others but with Pipes you can have more control of how different content are aggregated.
- Free Rice: For each right answer they donate 10 grains of rice. Hmmm, I wonder who counts the rice on the other end? I love this site. Every so often when I come in to work I’ll get on this site and work on my vocabulary. Every time I learn something new and I’ve donated some food to in the process. I think it’d be something neat for students to do during their free time on the computer.
Last and not least, what do you think of this presentation? It was created using Prezi. Pretty sweet, no? I got an account when it was still in Beta. Fun but I wish there’s music. One of my student mentioned this too in his paper.
I’ve usually just uploaded my presentations to Slide Share for conferences but I found this too recently, 280Slides, and want to give it a try when I have a chance.
There are more wonderful apps out there but for now… this is it. Until next time!
Posted: September 28th, 2009 under Web2.0.
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