Taming the Web

What a great resource audiobooks are. I didn’t realise that there were so many collections out there on the net. I checked out LibriVox and found a large collection of audiobooks. The only problem I have with these collections, though it is only minor, is that all the books are recorded in an American accent. In any case I will certainly be making use of these tools to download audiobooks for my students to listen to.

A few other great sites to check out for audiobooks are OpenCulture and Kids Learn Out Loud. Even though Kids Learn Out Loud is aimed at an American audience, it is a great resource for students in K-6.

Not sure how I feel about Second Life yet.  It is all a bit mind boggling to think that there are libraries in a virtual world.  Will explore this a bit more before I comment further.

Well You Tube certainly has had an impact since it appeared on the net a few years ago. It has allowed greater freedom of information, thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. I guess due to the lack of censoring on You Tube, schools have not fully embraced this tool. It is only recently that I have been allowed to unblock the school filters to allow YouTube to be available to teachers. The answer lies I think with teaching our students the skills and values necessary for them to choose to view appropriate rather than inappropriate content. The fact is that inappropriate content is always going to be out there.

By the way if you want a place to store your favourite You Tube, Teacher Tube or Google Videos, set up a Vodpod. This way you can share your collection with others who have a similar interest.

Well we’re all going podcast mad at school at the moment. I’ve finally taught myself how to use Audacity, to download the lame encoder and to set the preferences so that files can be exported as MP3 files. Now I just need several MP3 players and I will be right to start podcasting with my students. Out there on the web though there are fantastic podcasts available for download. At the moment I am teaching my students the text type exposition. My students are going to use the language features of this text to write their own advertisement, record it using Audacity and upload it to our blog to share. Along the way we will discuss things like audience, use of voice and intonation. This sort of teaching activity covers a range of learning outcomes including literacy, drama and ICT. To help them I have downloaded several podcasts to listen to so that we can discuss how each author has used their voice and language to reach their audience.

A wonderful example of what can be done with podcasting in the classroom can be found at Radio WillowWeb.

I am really excited about Wikis. I love the fact that many users can contribute to and shape a Wiki. Even more interesting is the fact that many people out there spend their time editing errors in entries that other people make on Wiki’s like Wikipedia. I would like to create my own Wiki so that teachers can collaborate and share their favourite websites with each other. I wonder does anyone know if there is a wiki provider that doesn’t have ads. Wikispaces is a popular provider but requires $5 a month for ad free wikis.

When I think of Library 2.0 I think of it in much the same way as Web 2.0. When Web 2.0 was introduced, it allowed people to be more than just consumers of information on the internet. They could begin generating content, interacting, communicating and connecting with other people globally in ways that just wasn’t possible with Web 1.0 Similarly, Library 2.0 now allows more people to become part of the creation of both the physical and the virtual services they want from their libraries.

To be more official though, I read and article called Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and its implication for Libraries. The author defines Library 2.0 as “the application of interactive, collaborative, and multi-media web-based technologies to web-based library services and collections.”

He goes on the describe Library 2.0 as a user-centered virtual community that is socially rich and often egalitarian. Librarians who work in this space now act as facilitators and provide support, and are not necessarily responsible for the creation of the content. Users interact with and create resources with one another and with librarians.

For anyone who is reading this page.. hopefully someone!! I captured the picture of my iGoogle page using a Web2.0 tool called Jing. This tool is a little magic box. You can capture any picture on your desktop, record yourself using the computer with voice over.  This would be great for creating mini tutorials for students.  Check out the little video under Jing on the sidebar that I created to illustrate this.

Well here it is.. my iGoogle page.  I choose the Leunig theme for my background.  It is a lot like the Web 2.0 tool Pageflakes.  You can organise all your tools on one page, email, news updates, weather etc  I know I am going to make use of this tool but I will need more time to explore its features.

Even though I am not a librarian I would find this a useful tool.  I often look for books in bookshops and can’t find them so this tool allows me to search for a book and it lists several book sellers that I could purchase the book from.  I am also learning that Google has so much too offer in terms of tools.  Having a gmail account makes it so much easier to access these tools and the browser Mozilla Firefox is essential too as all the features of Google can just be added to the browser.  No more Internet Explorer!!

Google Maps is lots of fun.  I have used it with my class when we have been discussing significant sites in Australia and the local area.  I am not sure how I feel about ‘Google Street’ though.  There is a picture of my house and my car parked in the driveway.  It is an invasion of privacy really.

Google also have something called ‘Doodle 4 Google My Australia’.  It shows a mark from all the schools that contributed a drawing about Google on the map of Australia.  It is a great showcase for schools I suppose.  Ours isn’t up there yet so I might get my students to enter a drawing.

Explore google docs is great if you have someone to share files with. A colleague sent me a Google document and I was able to modify it’s contents. If she had been online at the same time, we both could be collaborating on the same document in real time even though we are in two different locations. This is the beauty of this tool. I explored a little further and loved the templates that are provided eg. calendars, resumes, cover letters, photo presentation files just to name a few. The other thing I guess this eliminates is the need for a flash drive as all your documents are online and available globally wherever there is internet access.

I wanted to practise putting a youtube video into my blog so I decided to share this.  While we are encouraging our students to use Web 2.0 technologies, we need to skill them in internet safety practices.  This year the Catholic Bishops of Australia released a document called ‘Internet Safety’.  This is the You Tube video that goes with it.  The document can be viewed at  http://www.acbc.catholic.org.au/documents/200804271910.pdf

My Space and Facebook are tools which are very popular and with even knowing it, many people are using Web 2.0 technology as they fall into that category. For about 12 months now I have been using Facebook to connect with friends. I tried MySpace but found that it wasn’t as user friendly as Facebook and required more knowledge about html scripts which were needed to set up the page and have a layout that was easy on the eye. I also found MySpace users to be younger than those on Facebook. MySpace appears to be aimed at the teenage bracket while Facebook is designed more for adults. After looking back now though at a couple of MySpace pages I realise that it is being used by people for reasons other than connecting with friends e.g to promote a band, local library, author etc so I suppose it can be used for an educational purpose. All in all I think both tools are really good for high school students and promote social networking and connectivity but Facebook is the more user friendly of the two.

I just took a look at Rollyo.  I am starting to wonder where will all the Web 2.0 tools end?  While they have great potential I think there are just too many to explore.  I came across a website recently that listed the top 100 Web 2.0 tools which was interesting to see which were the most popular. I think we need a top 100 Web 2.0 tools website for education.   Back to Rollyo…  well I can see that it has potential for Stage 3 teachers because they create a list of websites about a particular topic and then their students can access only those websites but really, file management systems like MyClasses do the same thing.  We can create properties with links for students on particular topics.  I will have a closer look at Rollyo again soon. 

Well it has been some time now since I have been able to trial some new web 2.0 tools.  However, I am back on board now and I have to say today did not start out as a great success.  Unfortunately iGoogle was not working very well so I have jumped forward a few tasks to Week 8 which is using del.i.cious 

This tool has great possibilities for teachers.  At the moment I have website bookmarks everywhere, on my Mozilla browser at home, on my Internet Explorer browser at school and even more at my parents place on their computer.  What delicious allows me to do is upload all of those bookmarks to a site on the internet so that they can be accessed from anywhere.  Also I can tag them so that they are organised and I can share them with others. 

The best thing about de.lic.ious is that I can search for a topic, e.g interactive maths website and I can see a list of all the websites that have been bookmarked by other members.  If a website has 10,000 bookmarks then I know it must be useful and I just add it to my bookmarks.  If it only has 4 bookmarks then I don’t bother to look at it. 

Delicious is very helpful. I will be organising my bookmarks in the near future (a job for the holidays).

Tonight I took a look at some library blogs. I was really captivated by Helen Blower’s blog. I could just sit and read her posts for hours. They are very interesting and oh how I wish I had that much knowledge about technology. One thing I am finding with these social technologies is that they are very time consuming. I appreciate how Helen made the point of valuing time out on weekends from emails, comments, replies etc. It is really important I think to have a balance. Well while visiting her blog I came across another exciting Web 2.0 tool. It is called Snap Shots. I have added it to my blog. Hover over the speech bubbles in the sidebar and you will get snapshots of the links.

I just started using Google Reader today. The interface is not as user friendly as some of the other Web 2.0 tools but I know when I get more familiar with it I will feel more comfortable using it. Well I subscribed to six feeds including ‘The Sydney Morning Herald Technology Headlines’ and I just have to share their latest feed with whoever is reading this blog. The feed is on the sidebar and it is titled “Sydney Archbishop launches Facebook for the faithful”.

This afternoon I explored Library Thing. Fortunately I didn’t need an email address for this site to become a user. I could just select a username and password and my account was created. Once I logged in, I did a search for some of my favourite authors and all of their published works came up. I added the books I have read to what is called ‘MyLibrary’. Linked to each book were all the comments and discussion that people have had about them. I imagine this tool would be fantastic for librarians who have a blog. They could use it to post the latest books purchased for their library and visitors could keep updated by checking the blog and reading the reviews attached to them. Oh by the way, you can add ‘MyLibrary’ to your blog by clicking on ‘Your Profile’ and on the sidebar there is a link ‘Put Your Library on Your Blog’.

This task was so much fun. I just didn’t realise how many tools there are out there that can be used to manipulate photos. Today I went to the site Image Generator and selected a tool called ‘Face Magazine Covers’ to create this graphic. It was very simple and just involved uploading a photo and selecting a magazine cover that I liked. The two merged and then I was given the option to download the photo and save it. So here I am on the cover of PC Magazine. I guess I am now famous! Well… at least on this blog anyway.  I can’t wait to explore other image generators.  There are links also on the sidebar to these sites.