Thing 23

The Web 2.0 journey..... it's certainly not a destination! This course presented a lot of material in a well structured way. I have used my experiences from this course to offer professional development opportunities to the teachers in our district. I have found many tools that I was previously unaware of. These tools can be used both in and outside of the classroom. It is my intent to continue to offer professional development opportunities to our teachers using these tools and the many others that I have explored.

My big takeaways from this course are Blogger and Wikispaces. These two tools are essential to understanding and utilizing many of the other Web 2.0 tools. Without the opportunity to use these tools to "play", I would not have gained experience with them. By using them through this course, it provided a safe way to "play" and learn without having a classroom or "professional" audience of your colleagues....it was a classroom experience and a safe way to learn.

Thank you for putting this course together. This by far is one of the best professional development courses that I have been involved in and would recommend this to anyone with a desire to learn about Web 2.0!

Thing 22

My wiki can be found at: http://kassubat.wikispaces.com/

I have really enjoyed learning how to use Wikispaces. I really like this tool versus others because you can embed HTML code and utilize other Web 2.0 tools with it.

Wikis should be used for one of two reasons (or both):

1. As a website in the event that the educator doesn't have one. The teacher could use this to post lessons, policies, and other communication to the parents and students.
2. As a collaborative project for students

Blogs should be used for posting information or for simple interaction with the blog posts. It does not have the in depth collaborative tools that wikis offer. My recommendation is to use a blog for simple posts or communication - use a wiki for collaboration or in lieu of a website.

Thing 21

Wikis are a fantastic way to assign collaborative work. I didn't find just one wiki that inspired me, however, it was more of a compilation. I spent a lot of time searching through the educational wikis to gather ideas on how educators were using them.

Here are some of the hurdles that I found and solutions to overcome:

• students need email addresses - not true... Wikispaces allows you to create user names and passwords if you have an education account
• the ads on the side of the wiki - again, you can email Wikispaces and request they remove the ads - or you can pay to upgrade also
• in collaborative projects, only certain students actually do the work - Wikispaces keeps revision history so you can see exactly who does what and when
• parents may not want their student to publish their work online - gain permission slips or come up with an alternate assignment for those students that can't participate

In closing, I think that working with Wikis is well worth the effort whether you are using it as a communication tool or a collaboration tool with students. It's a simple process to create and update and provides the educator with an online presence.

Thing 20

My preference of tools for locating podcasts is iTunes. Personally, I find if much more appealing and useful than using EPN or some of the other sites. Perhaps it's because I'm familiar with the interface, but I find EPN to be very sterile and hard to navigate. I also prefer iTunes since that's the program that I use for everything else (music, movies, apps).

I have several subscriptions, but my favorite podcast is Apple Quick Tips (though they haven't created a new episode since Sept 09).

Thing 19

Podcasting is a very powerful tool that I hope more of our educators will utilize in the future. I gained several ideas on how other educators are using Podcasts in Education by watching the movies.

I listen regularly to the following podcasts:

Radio WillowWeb
Apple Quick Tips
Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Professionally, only the Apple Quick tips helps me by showing helpful tips with the MAC OS. However, I'm forever searching for great podcasts that show how other educators are using them to take back to our teachers to replicate.

Thing 18

Slideshare is a wonderful tool! I really like the idea of being able to share your presentations online. This enables users to benefit from other authors' knowledge. I have been using Slideshare to find additional popular Web 2.0 tools.

Slideshare is also a great way to share your presentation if you are a presenter at a conference or a teacher in the classroom. Another use would be for Professional Development whether it's school-wide or district-wide. Slideshare would eliminate the need to email the presentation that could be quite large in size.

If you are using Slideshare as part of your curriculum, it eliminates software requirements for the students, as well as opportunities for remediation at their convenience.

Example of an embedded Slideshare:

Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools - According to Me and Fred

View more presentations from Heather Hurley.

Thing 17

The online productivity tool that I chose is iGoogle. When you log in to Google (say, for your Google Docs), you can also set up a iGoogle home page. I highly recommend this tool to organize your "online resources" for personal and professional use.

Your iGoogle home page can incorporate your RSS feeds (instead of Bloglines), Google docs, your gmail account, a date/time gadget, news stories and so much more! Google offers gadgets that you can embed on your home page that assists in your productivity.

I personally have my home page set up to view my RSS feeds, my google docs, google calendar, a weather gadget, as well as other personal "fun" items such as a horoscope, etc. I use this tool on a daily basis to keep myself organized and up to date with the RSS feeds.