BLOG Challenge Question 6:
Which Web 2.0 tools do you believe will have the greatest impact on schools?
Hello everyone. Mark, Pam and I are going to attempt to give you a brief overview of Web 2.0 tools in as few words a possible. Please review some of the tools and tell us what you think! We have two important questions for discussion at the end of this blog.
Web 1.0 refers to the World Wide Web before Web 2.0. It includes most web sites in the period between 1994 and 2004 (e.g., Britannica on-line). These offline, application-based web pages were static with no collaboration among users. Content was generally copyrighted and usage required a license or a purchase. Web 1.0 has been retroactively named after the introduction of the term web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a category of new internet tools and technologies created around the idea that people who consume media, access the internet, and use the Web should be active contributors rather then passively absorb what’s available. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Web 2.0 includes but is not limited to Blogs (e.g., does this term sound familiar?), social networking applications (e.g., Facebook, MySpace), RSS or Really Simple Syndication (e.g., really brief overview of your favorite websites), and Wikis (e.g., public spaces that allow people on the internet to collaborate and/or share information).
According to Gwen Solomon and Lynn Schrum, the possibilities of using Web 2.0 tools in schools are unlimited. However, different computer-enhanced learning tools are better suited for different purposes. We believe the following Web 2.0 tools with noted benefits for administrators, teachers, and students, will have the greatest impact in educational environments. Consider the Web 2.0 tools below and let us know if you agree that they will have a significant impact at the elementary level.
PODCASTS
A podcast is a way of distributing music or speech multimedia files over the internet for playback on mobile devices such as iPods, MP3 players and personal computers. Podcasts can be downloaded automatically and accessed using current devices. Podcasts can be an effective tool for :
Replaying the audio of traditionally delivered information
Pre-teaching and vocabulary development
Professional development training sessions and lectures that need to be readily accessible at all times
Learning new material, subjects that are difficult to comprehend and foreign languages
Meeting the needs of students who require multiple input strategies or alternative methods of expression
Providing auditory input and repetition.
Presenting lectures, books, and magazines using an auditory format
Empowering parents and community members by providing information about educational issues, concerns and current initiatives.
See and/or visit Podcasts for Teachers (www.idiotvox.com/Education/PodCast_Review_Podcast for Teachers_ _ 13037.html).
WIKIS
A wiki is a web page that allows readers including administrators, teachers, and students to share and collaborate with others in writing, editing, and changing the Web page’s content at any time. Wikis can be set up on a school district’s server or accessed through a commercial service using a Web browser and an internet connection. Wikis keep track of contributions and changes to content. Popular Wiki sites dedicated to businesses and education are Jotspot, Pswiki, and Wikispaces. Wikis can be an effective tool for:
Collaborative authoring and planning
Collaboration and problem-solving
Peer editing during the writing process
Creation of electronic portfolios
Continuous exchange of feedback.
Visit Peanut Butter Wiki (www.pbwiki.com) or Wikispaces at (www.wikispaces.com).
GAMES and SIMULATIONS
Educational games and computer simulations available on the Web generally include the use of multimedia. Robert Marzano (1998) found that “the use of computer simulation as a vehicle with which students manipulate artifacts produced the highest effect size of 1.45 (n=1) indicating a percentile gain of 43 points (p.91). Interactive multimedia applications for elementary students in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, the arts, and problem-solving are available without costs or by subscription. Popular sites have features that include standards-based activities, teacher guides that highlight learning objectives and progress summaries, resource links for teacher, students, and parents and message centers for users. Quality simulations can be an effective tool for:
Generating mental pictures and images to represent and elaborate on knowledge
Reinforcing skills taught in the classroom
Interactive, socially reinforced learning
Parental participation in the learning process.
Visit iKnowthat.com (www.iknowthat.com) or Knowitall.org (www.knowitall.org ).
ADDITIONAL TOOLS
Additional tools that can be used in conjunction with Web 2.0 tools to increase participation of traditionally excluded users include:
TALKING WORD PROCESSORS
An tool specifically designed to help Microsoft Word users with reading and writing difficulties reads text aloud and helps construct words and sentences. It also has advanced spell checking and word prediction of miss-spelt or unfinished words, a word wizard to search for forgotten or related words, a pronunciation tutor, a text reader, and a document scanner. Visit www.texthelp.com. and www.donjohnston.com.
These are effective tools for:
Students in K-12 grade with limited reading skills
Students having difficulties expressing their ideas in writing
Students who need to write and work independently
English language learners
Parents with reading and writing difficulties
While many of us in the web 1.0 generation are just getting used to setting up an e-mail account on Google and finishing up our latest Powerpoint presentation.
I did an old fashion thing with a new twist the other day. In the past when I wanted to learn about something new I would go to the library and check out a book on that topic. So, the other day I went on Amazon and did a search for web 2.0. I was amazed at the amount of books that are out on the topic.
As Monique noted in her opening part of this blog, Web 2.0 technologies are already changing the playing field for education. As noted on Pam’s section for Web 2.0 tools the one constant is that our students are no longer content receivers. They are now content providers and BIG TIME!
As you’ll see here in the secondary setting these technologies are creating huge changes in how educators and students receive and respond to information. In fact, our students control the information. I encourage everyone to check these tools out during your “free-time”.
Web 2.0 Tools in a Secondary Setting
As Pam noted in her elementary school section of Web 2,0 tools, this generation is full of innovative and creative tools such as Podcasts, Wikis (collaborative publishing), Games and Talking Word processing.
Writeboard
Writeboard is a collaborative writing tool where users can write, share, revise, and compare their documents online with others. It is not an advanced system featuring a WYSIWYG editor, Ajax, and flashy effects, but that’s what I like about it. Writeboard is a personal favorite of mine and as a matter of fact I am using it right now for this very post. It includes version control with text comparing and is great for essays and write-ups of any kind.
Check it out: http://www.writeboard.com/
Fleck
Fleck is a really cool tool that allows you to annotate websites without ever having to download any sort of software. A student could add post-its all on their favorite web pages or web pages that they are using for research. A student can then send them to their peers or look at them in list form on a personal web page.
Check it out http://www.fleck.com/
School 2.0
School 2.0 is a fascinating brainstorming tool designed for schools and communities to help envision the future of education. The School 2.0 site states, “While School 2.0 depicts a variety of educational and management scenarios that utilize technology, the examples, information and ideas included are designed to serve as prompts for discussion and should not be construed as a recommendation of any particular technology or scenario.”
Check it out: http://etoolkit.org/etoolkit/
For our blog discussion, we pose the following two questions,
"What do we do when we keep offering 2.0 services like Blogs and Wikis, and the students just walk away?"
Terence K Huwe (2008, January). The Joy of Finding Out What People Don't Want. Computers in Libraries, 28(1), 26-28
and
"Are there additional tools you believe will have a significant impact on schools?"
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Blog # 5: In what ways can Web 2.0 Tools impact communication and learning among students, including students with disabilities?
I apologize for the delay in this posting. I became a new uncle last night, so my Saturday was fairly consumed. You'll see a slightly different tone in our post this week, but we wanted to take this in a more conversational direction.
Imagine this… your typical high-school cafeteria. There’s the jock table. There’s the table of the kids playing Yu-gi-oh or the new trend to take its place. There’s the bad boy table. There’s usually a popular girl table, the Goth kid table, the various club tables, and finally – there’s the special ed table. You can spot it right away. They usually have an inordinate amount of adults sitting with them or at least hovering in the near distance. There will be a lunch room administrator watching them as intently as the “bad boys” table filled with repeat rule offenders. There’s usually not a lot of interpersonal communication between the kids. There’s usually the kids – maybe with CP or other physical needs – who are more focused on the actual mechanics of eating to worry about small conversation. Then there are the others – kids with milder disabilities who have been relegated to the table. They all have that tell-tale look of misery – don’t make eye contact with anyone else at the outside tables for fear of being associated with the “speddies” and unable to socialize with their table-mates for fear of losing their order in the social caste as at least above “that kid.” It’s seen over and over again. Even in full-special education schools – a pecking order will exist. There are variations to its form, but the basic message is maintained: we are different based on our appearances, outward behaviors, our groupings – by choice or not. Yet lest we forget the message of The Breakfast Club, we can all find some common ground if only given the chance. But that was a movie, and in real-life, kids rarely afford one another that chance…until now.
Let’s take another scenario… A group of kids – the jock, the popular girl, the bad boy, the drama queen, and the student with disabilities are all engaging in an ongoing online conversation over IM about their shared interest in anime. They don’t really know one another…they give fake name, fake identities, fake bios, but their conversation is genuine. For once, students are able to move beyond the superficial to engage the core of each others’ personality to find commonality. Is it Utopia?
No, not really. It’s an illusion. The moment one of the disenfranchised reveals their true identity, they are out of the make-believe club house and back to the hard knocks of being an outcast. This phenomenon is so common it has its own name – cyber bullying. And we begin our conversation about the advent of Web 2.0 tools here as a bit of a reality check – technology is fantastic and holds great promise, but it is nothing without accounting for the human factor. And that is the greatest challenge of all.
Video mail, blogging, student created and controlled wikis, all the things listed in Solomon and Schrum, can be an equalizer for communication and access to learning, but they only get the student so far. For example, a student with a writing disability could do a video podcast or Webinar if that was an easier modality for them. That is akin to the old oral report alternative used in classrooms for generations, and it could be argued that learning this computer skill allows the student to be more competitive in the work force than simply presenting an oral account of the assigned reading, but the student who is able to master that tool is probably not the one you need to worry about. In fact, students with disabilities who effectively learn to use any of the 2.0 systems – web publishing, multi-user environments, powerful search engines – are probably doing okay. These are complicated applications to master! There is a motivation issue, and the use of the computer for all students is more authentic to their everyday lives than traditional curricula. But we will quickly see the procrastination that exists when asking a student to turn in a five pager on the Gettyburg Address will exist if that same topic was allowed to be a Webinar, designed webpage, or other innovation medium. Now if we say, turn in a critical analysis of the video-game Halo3 explaining the levels of societal oppression represented in the storyline and compare that to real-life historical accounts, we may get a little more traction. But that’s not technology…it’s pedagogy, and effective teachers have done that long before there was a thought of the computer.
The point is, advances in technology are wonderful, and they can help students to adapt to their environments in some cases, but many times, the kids who need the most help are the ones who are getting as equally left behind with the technology craze as they were with the traditional curriculum. I viewed a Myspace page for a student I used to teach; A young man with a diagnosis of emotional disturbance. He was an average kid, loved video games, was isolated from most of his peers, and was fairly computer savvy. His page was dark… it was angry. He posts numerous blogs. They are mostly rants filled with spelling and punctuation errors. Some were unintelligible. He doesn’t use any real photos, there are pieces clipped from video games and movies. He has a modest number of “friends” by Myspace standards – about 322 – but from their meager comments, none truly know this student. Most have pseudonyms as well, so I couldn’t say positively that none were classmates of this young man, but even if they were, there wasn’t enough of a bond to truly converse. They shared angry postings replete with numerous obscenities and condemnations of “punks.” I read his page, and I felt sad. He’s three years out of high-school. He claims to be unemployed and still living with his grandmother. Most of his messages yearn for a girl, so I suspect he has no companion. He didn’t do college and he has no real future prospects. This wasn’t a young man with a cognitive delay, nor was he a student who just needed a voice device to assist with reading or to keep him organized. He was an average student with poor grades, modest ambitions, but capable of carrying on a decent conversation if you could get him to talk. He was complex, and for all of our technology, and our upgrades, we haven’t built a program that can compensate for the complexity of the human condition. So we can move forward with our tools, and they will make classroom applications more engaging, perhaps more in-line with the demands of future employers, and they may help some students with disabilities compensate for some of their deficits, but until we address the fundamental needs of these students – from a whole learner perspective and in a societal context – it will all be just another thing tried with no real effect.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go twitter.
Imagine this… your typical high-school cafeteria. There’s the jock table. There’s the table of the kids playing Yu-gi-oh or the new trend to take its place. There’s the bad boy table. There’s usually a popular girl table, the Goth kid table, the various club tables, and finally – there’s the special ed table. You can spot it right away. They usually have an inordinate amount of adults sitting with them or at least hovering in the near distance. There will be a lunch room administrator watching them as intently as the “bad boys” table filled with repeat rule offenders. There’s usually not a lot of interpersonal communication between the kids. There’s usually the kids – maybe with CP or other physical needs – who are more focused on the actual mechanics of eating to worry about small conversation. Then there are the others – kids with milder disabilities who have been relegated to the table. They all have that tell-tale look of misery – don’t make eye contact with anyone else at the outside tables for fear of being associated with the “speddies” and unable to socialize with their table-mates for fear of losing their order in the social caste as at least above “that kid.” It’s seen over and over again. Even in full-special education schools – a pecking order will exist. There are variations to its form, but the basic message is maintained: we are different based on our appearances, outward behaviors, our groupings – by choice or not. Yet lest we forget the message of The Breakfast Club, we can all find some common ground if only given the chance. But that was a movie, and in real-life, kids rarely afford one another that chance…until now.
Let’s take another scenario… A group of kids – the jock, the popular girl, the bad boy, the drama queen, and the student with disabilities are all engaging in an ongoing online conversation over IM about their shared interest in anime. They don’t really know one another…they give fake name, fake identities, fake bios, but their conversation is genuine. For once, students are able to move beyond the superficial to engage the core of each others’ personality to find commonality. Is it Utopia?
No, not really. It’s an illusion. The moment one of the disenfranchised reveals their true identity, they are out of the make-believe club house and back to the hard knocks of being an outcast. This phenomenon is so common it has its own name – cyber bullying. And we begin our conversation about the advent of Web 2.0 tools here as a bit of a reality check – technology is fantastic and holds great promise, but it is nothing without accounting for the human factor. And that is the greatest challenge of all.
Video mail, blogging, student created and controlled wikis, all the things listed in Solomon and Schrum, can be an equalizer for communication and access to learning, but they only get the student so far. For example, a student with a writing disability could do a video podcast or Webinar if that was an easier modality for them. That is akin to the old oral report alternative used in classrooms for generations, and it could be argued that learning this computer skill allows the student to be more competitive in the work force than simply presenting an oral account of the assigned reading, but the student who is able to master that tool is probably not the one you need to worry about. In fact, students with disabilities who effectively learn to use any of the 2.0 systems – web publishing, multi-user environments, powerful search engines – are probably doing okay. These are complicated applications to master! There is a motivation issue, and the use of the computer for all students is more authentic to their everyday lives than traditional curricula. But we will quickly see the procrastination that exists when asking a student to turn in a five pager on the Gettyburg Address will exist if that same topic was allowed to be a Webinar, designed webpage, or other innovation medium. Now if we say, turn in a critical analysis of the video-game Halo3 explaining the levels of societal oppression represented in the storyline and compare that to real-life historical accounts, we may get a little more traction. But that’s not technology…it’s pedagogy, and effective teachers have done that long before there was a thought of the computer.
The point is, advances in technology are wonderful, and they can help students to adapt to their environments in some cases, but many times, the kids who need the most help are the ones who are getting as equally left behind with the technology craze as they were with the traditional curriculum. I viewed a Myspace page for a student I used to teach; A young man with a diagnosis of emotional disturbance. He was an average kid, loved video games, was isolated from most of his peers, and was fairly computer savvy. His page was dark… it was angry. He posts numerous blogs. They are mostly rants filled with spelling and punctuation errors. Some were unintelligible. He doesn’t use any real photos, there are pieces clipped from video games and movies. He has a modest number of “friends” by Myspace standards – about 322 – but from their meager comments, none truly know this student. Most have pseudonyms as well, so I couldn’t say positively that none were classmates of this young man, but even if they were, there wasn’t enough of a bond to truly converse. They shared angry postings replete with numerous obscenities and condemnations of “punks.” I read his page, and I felt sad. He’s three years out of high-school. He claims to be unemployed and still living with his grandmother. Most of his messages yearn for a girl, so I suspect he has no companion. He didn’t do college and he has no real future prospects. This wasn’t a young man with a cognitive delay, nor was he a student who just needed a voice device to assist with reading or to keep him organized. He was an average student with poor grades, modest ambitions, but capable of carrying on a decent conversation if you could get him to talk. He was complex, and for all of our technology, and our upgrades, we haven’t built a program that can compensate for the complexity of the human condition. So we can move forward with our tools, and they will make classroom applications more engaging, perhaps more in-line with the demands of future employers, and they may help some students with disabilities compensate for some of their deficits, but until we address the fundamental needs of these students – from a whole learner perspective and in a societal context – it will all be just another thing tried with no real effect.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go twitter.
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