Stand-out Web 2.0 Tools

There are two items I am very excited to get using this year. The first is the wiki. I am serious about a Caesar-pedia! I think that will infuse a new level of engagement for the students about who the characters of Shakespeare's play are and how they interact in the drama. Students will have to put an image with each entry and provide important quotations from the play. It is hard for me to wait until it happens. After finishing the class module on wikis, I went straight to my school's Moodle to check if there was a built in wiki tool. Jackpot! I'm already building the structure for it.

The other technology I am developing for instruction is augmented reality. The Aurasma app is a game-changer in the classroom. I showed one of my classes an example today, and the students were very impressed. It seems like a great way to construct stations for round-robin content review and for students to construct presentations to accompany projects. I have already spoken to the head of my school about using Aurasma in our art shows so that visitors can have videos of the student-artists describing their works. Each visitor's mobile device could act as a docent.

Audio and Video Casting

I've posted below an example of a short screencast I put together a couple of months ago to aid students in their preparation for a quiz in my class. I have plenty of experience with podcasting and screencasting both for church and school. A short video is a great way to reinforce instructions or construct a partial flip of a classroom.

This video was made using the Knowmia app on my iPad. The app is great because each of the slides is a separate card onto which audio is recorded. This means that if I make a mistake in the audio on one of the cards, I don't have to redo the audio for the whole video. When exporting the video, the system puts all the cards and their audio files into one video. It was a surprise for me to learn that Blogger allows direct import of video files into its system. I just uploaded the video directly to this post.

As I wrote above, screencasting, podcasting, and videocasting are great ways to reinforce instruction, remind students of directions, and rehearse content. I particularly think that screencasting is one of the most effective ways to deliver video and audio content in instruction. Its best use, however, would be to put the flexibility and creativity possibilities of a screencast into students' hands so that they can reach the highest levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Students could create their own vidcasts/screencasts as part of analysis of a character or as a way to animate a literary scene. Activities like this would address ISTE-S 1.b and 2.b. Students would be creating their own piece as a means of expression and would be communicating information and ideas using a variety of media.

Photo-sharing and Flickr

Photo-sharing was quite cumbersome in the early days of the Internet. I recall using email at first and then moving on to posting pictures on my own Web space. That also required sending an email to the people I wanted to see my pictures. When I first heard of Flickr, my friends who were into photography introduced me so they could show me their pictures. One of the most impressive features to me at the time was the way Flickr automatically scaled the images so a visitor could download a picture at different sizes and resolutions. Of course, titling and tagging are what make searching images possible on Flickr. It seems that Facebook and Instagram have become the most popular photo-sharing services at this point. Over the years I have also used DeviantArt (http://www.deviantart.com/) as a source for images. It can be edgy at times, but some of the digital art is amazing.

Here is a picture I took in while on a mission trip in Hungary.

Heroes' Square in Budapest

Flickr would make a good classroom resource for constructing storyboards as part of a pre-writing exercise. After assigning a topic, I could ask students to find four or five pictures on Flickr that contain a unifying element representative of an author, for example Poe. They would then use those images as a storyboard for composing a short story in the style of Poe.




I repeatedly use photos as part of my curriculum in vocabulary, grammar, and literary history. With grammar in particular, I use images to engage students in thinking about how they use language to describe the contents of a picture. This is a great point of departure for getting students to take a critical look at their own use of language.

An exercise like the Poe storyboard seems to apply most to the first standard of ISTE-S, Creativity and Innovation. Students would be creating something original as a means of self expression. Their storyboards would serve as the background for original writing.

Social Bookmarking

Before I read the segment on tagging, I was a bit confused about what social bookmarking could possibly be. Tagging, however, made it entirely clear given the rise of the hashtag. The term folksonomy was especially helpful for me in conceiving of the way users construct categories of information.

A social bookmarking website could be very useful for gathering a collection of student-safe web resources. Teachers could create a repository of websites that have been reviewed in advance for safety and reliability. Students could search through these collected pages in order to perform research at various levels without much concern they will view inappropriate material.

With the use I described, students would have to fulfill standard 2.a of ISTE-S by interacting with peers and experts and employing a variety of digital media to do so. Again with this activity, I feel like CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8 is directly applicable.