The four main Web 2.0 tools that the podcast mentioned include blogs, Wikis, Twitter, and Diigo. I think that class blogs and class Twitter accounts are great uses in the classroom. It allows teachers to post announcements and reminders on social media, something that young students look at every day. It also allows students to contact their teachers and their other classmates easily, which helps to facilitate quick responses to things like homework questions and study help. As far as Wikis and Diigo goes, I've personally never used them, but they sound very interesting and seem to be great study tools for research and group projects. However, in the professional environment of a classroom, I'm not sure how reliable they would be since anyone is able to create and edit any number of interlinked web pages. Also since students are able to respond and comment on other student's work, these programs would need to be heavily monitored by the teacher to make sure the feedback and collaborative conversations are appropriate. In order to use these Web 2.0 tools, there will obviously be some basic computer equipment involved, like the mouse, monitor, and keyboard. But the teacher can also supplement the use of these tools with network tools for monitoring and tracking in order to ensure appropriate student use of the technology. The teachers can also use an LCD projector or an electronic white board to instruct the students on how to navigate around the different programs, like Diigo, as well as to present examples of different students' blogs to discuss as a class.
One Web 2.0 tool that I found interesting and that can be very helpful in the classroom is Scribd. Scribd is a digital library and ebook, audiobook and comic book subscription service that includes one million titles. It even has 60 million documents on its open publishing platform, which would be a great resource for student research. The use of this tool in the classroom is an essential way to get kids reading. Especially those kids who may not be able to afford to buy every single book assigned by a teacher, or who may not have the resources to get to a library in order to pick up a paper copy of the book. With over one millions copies of different genres of books, it is pretty much guaranteed that the book a student is looking for will be there, while a local library isn't always that reliable with books sometimes being out of stock. In addition, the new audiobook aspect of Scribd allows for those students who may benefit more from audio learning to succeed in reading just as much as the visual learners. Scribd is even able to recommend future books that you may be interested in as it pays attention to the genre of books you typically read and seem to enjoy. With the thousands of books and so many topics to choose from, like health, children, religion, and so on, Scribd will definitely have a book for any type of reader. Link: https://www.scribd.com
Before the concept mapping assignment, I never knew how to generate a concept map online, but now I realize that Inspiration is a great tool for doing so. It is easy to use and has many tools, like pictures and hyperlinks, that can take your concept map to the next level. For this assignment, I enjoyed using Inspiration and making the concept map how I saw it best flowed. However, I feel like there was almost too much information about World War I to fit into only one concept map. I think if it were a real study guide for students, as a teacher, I would break up the different aspects of the War, like the causes, the timeline, and the alliances, into separate concept maps, just so that it is easier to understand and so the study guide doesn't become too busy and filled with words. In my future teaching career, I would definitely use concept maps as a study tool, as I think it's a great way to visually lay out all of the key concepts from the material. I also enjoyed learning about the different types of concepts maps and what they're typically used for so that in the future I can create one that fits the topic at hand the best. Here is my concept map about WWI:
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