Summercore Blog » Web 2.0

Top Web 2.0 Sites

summercore — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:41:40 +0000

Here is a short list of my favorites:

Edublogs.org for blogs designed for school use, the main site has video tutorials and an RSS feed for updates
wikispaces and pbwiki for wikis useful for school use
YouTube for videos useful for any curriculum- be sure to check out channels devoted to specific subjects
Google Reader for aggregating RSS feeds- you will need to register
Flickr for tagged photos
Delicious for social bookmarking
Voicethread for digital storytelling and combining voice recordings with graphics

Two Cute Web 2.0 Sites

summercore — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:05:31 +0000

One of the best things about Web 2.0 is the ease with which they fit into the curriculum, ranging from Foreign Language to Lower School Reading. There always seems to be a way to incorporate these sites into a digital storytelling project, an exploration of verb tenses, or a strategy for summarizing skills learned in class each week.One of the two cute sites is blabberize. This is not the best site ever, but it can be used for many purposes. Simply upload a picture, draw a circle around the mouth, record a sentence or two and there you have it: a talking picture. Think of its uses: talking animals telling about their habitat, students describing a recent event, a political candidate voicing an issue. Try it. The second site is Bubbleply. This site allows the user to add pop-up bubbles to a youtube video. You can choose when and for how long the bubble will appear. Bubbles can include text and hyperlinks. Again, think of the many ways to use this site: a history class can annotate a famous speech, a French class can dub a commercial, a lower school reading class can add bubbles to a video of a class trip. The link feature makes this an even more powerful tool for upper school students, who can create links to websites, maps, and other resources.

Using Delicious

summercore — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:48:15 +0000

As a recent convert to Delicious, I spent a good part of the vacation spiffing up my Delicious page of links. I have added many new links for curriculum integration content and many new resources for Biology, Chemistry, and History. For those of you new to Delicious, please use my links to explore the many possibilities Delicious offers, from sharing links with a colleague, to monitoring your student’s research, to finding great websites recommended by others. Here is the link to my main Delicious page, but then use the tags search to find those links that will be most helpful to your curriculum.

Web 2.0 Presentation

summercore — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:56:22 +0000

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Web 2.0 for Foreign Language Teachers

summercore — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:41:02 +0000

Foreign language teachers have so many possibilities open to them because their pedagogy mirrors the creativity allowed by Web 2.0. Voicethread is an obvious example; teachers can upload images for students to describe, and then students can listen to the responses of their classmates and their teacher. Voicethread can also be used for digital storytelling, so students can create their own narrated fairy tales, myths, and short stories.

Then there is Vozme, an amazing web site for Spanish teachers. Teachers or students can copy and paste or type Spanish text into the web site and then hear it read back to them. I am told by many Spanish teachers that the reader’s voice is terrific, absolutely perfect Spanish. Students can copy in segments of papers they are writing to hear them spoken aloud, or teachers can copy and paste an article from a Spanish newspaper, or a poem, or a section of a novel for students to read and listen to simultaneously. The sound files can be saved as mp3 to be downloaded into an ipod or e-mailed to others.

Yet one more interesting site is Overstream. Overstream allows students and teachers to add subtitles to youtube videos. Students can provide the foreign language text for a French or Spanish video, or they can mute the sound of a commercial, music video clip, or coming attraction of a movie to provide foreign language subtitles. Easy and very cool!

Some Cool Web 2.0 Sites- Delicious to start

summercore — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:10:53 +0000

The abundance of cool web 2.0 sites can be overwhelming, so I thought I might highlight a useful dozen or so over the next few posts. For those of you unclear as to the meaning of web 2.0, these sites are designed for easy interaction, allowing you to create content on-line.One of the more popular sites is Delicious, a social bookmarking site. At first, I was not that thrilled with delicious, but as I used it more, I began to appreciate it. Here is a slideshow created by Sam Schalman-Bergen for Summercore:

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First off, Delicious is a great place to back up all of your bookmarks; everyone backs up their files, but if you lost your laptop, wouldn’t you be crushed if you lost all your favorites from Internet Explorer or Safari or Firefox. Delicious provides that backup. You can then access your bookmarks(favorites) from any computer. But it is much more than a backup location: it is social bookmarking. So what does social bookmarking mean? First off, it means that you can share your bookmarks (all or just a selected group) with friends, family, colleagues and students. One classroom use of delicious is a group research project, allowing students or you to post good web sites. Students can write descriptions of the web sites they chose as part of a media literacy project.But there is even more. Social bookmarking allows you to view the bookmarks of others, so you can search for a specific topic to see if others have created a useful list, saving you the time.Then there is the advantage of tags. Tags is the web 2.0 word for categories. The advantage to normal saving of bookmarks or favorites within your web browser is that you can easily and quickly add multiple tags to each bookmark. Why is this good? Then you can easily find and sort your bookmarks. For instance, in my browser, I have a category for Web 2.0 sites, but in delicious, I can tag then as Web 2.0 plus education, plus integration, plus graphics, plus video, etc.I am now convinced that delicious is worth the time.

Google Earth in the classroom

summercore — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:16:23 +0000

Google Earth–and the ability to easily create tours with Google Maps–lends itself to many curriculum uses. In a literature class, teachers and/or students can create a guided tour of the main character’s journey, highlighting each stop along the way with quotations from the novel, descriptions of the stop and its relationship to the novel’s themes, pictures evocative of the spot’s symbolic or thematic significance, a discussion of the character’s growth, and links to interesting web resources. In foreign language classes, students and teachers can create guided tours of a city, or a scavenger hunt, or a recreation of where in the world is carmen sandiego with clues in each pop-up balloon. Foreign language teachers can also have students visit a city and then find cafes, cinemas, restaurants, etc. and provide them with a budget to spend for a one-day visit. Students can write an essay determining the best spot for a new hotel based on GE research about local attractions, subway stops, and amenities. Younger students can create a tour of a particular country. History students can create tours tracing the journeys of great explorers or the conquests of emperors or the key battles in a war. Study latitude and longitude with a treasure hunt. The possibilities are endless. Here is a youtube video with some suggestions about using Google Earth in the classroom:

Try Voicethreads

summercore — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:37:42 +0000

Voicethread allows you to upload images; then different students can record their comments for each image, creating a slideshow with many commentaries. Students can also add written responses. Foreign language teachers, lower school teachers, and english teachers will particularly like this site, but history, science and math teachers can create interesting Voicethread slideshows. The site has tutorials and suggestions for using a voicethread in the classroom Try it.