Web+2.0

The Web 2.0 tools that I found the most interesting and the most potentially helpful for me when I become a teacher were PreZentit, School Wax TV, Photo Story 3, WebPoster, and Springnote. PreZentit is a website that allows people to create presentations and have multiple people working on it at the same time. The presentation can be public or private and can be downloaded to a computer and viewed without the internet. I think that this tool is perfect for group presentations assigned to students in the classroom. The teacher can monitor the progress of each group’s presentation and ensure that only the students are participating. It also allows the students more freedom in the ability to work together; they are not limited to the time given in class or their free hours at school. The site also facilitates faster communication of ideas, suggestions, and corrections amongst the students. School Wax TV is an education-based website that focuses on providing teacher-approved videos for students. There are videos on all school topics--English, social studies, science, mathematics, etc.-- that can be used in students’ research and videos that provide help with homework by demonstrating how to do a math problem, providing step-by-step demonstrations, and providing examples and samples of assignments and projects. I believe this tool would be mostly useful for research projects for students. The teacher can trust the content of the videos. Both students and teachers could download videos and share them with the class to aid in teaching a subject or as part of a presentation. PhotoStory 3 is a website where people can create slideshows with their own digital photos and touch-up, crop, or rotate the pictures. They can add special effects, soundtracks, voice narration, titles and captions to the slide shows. I believe this tool is useful to students doing presentations individually or in groups. It provides more variety and options so that students can make their presentations more unique than with what is provided in Powerpoint and be more creative in sharing their information. Teachers can also create their own presentations as part of their curriculum to help engage students in what they’re learning and make it more interesting for them. SpringNote is an online notebook where people can create pages, work on them with friends, and share files. People can work on group projects as it allows group members to easily collaborate. I believe this tool would be useful for students working in groups so that they can keep in touch with one another and share ideas and research. Also, the teacher can monitor the students, each group member’s contribution, and the progress of the group as a whole, even providing help. SpringNote can also be used by teachers to organize content for students and make it easily accessible to them or even to collaborate with other teachers and share ideas and tools that can help in teaching their curriculum.

WebPoster is a website that allows teachers to create their lessons and worksheets and even a class page. They can immediately publish them online for their students and make them easily accessible. Teachers can also set up classes and assign projects to their students, who can do the assignments by creating their own online projects or reports on the site. Teachers and students can even add images and links to their pages. I believe this tool is useful for organizing the content needed for a class and making it available to students outside of the classroom itself. Teachers can design their own presentations and papers in ways that specifically target their class of students to best help them understand the information.

I enjoyed learning about Web 2.0 tools. Many such tools are useful to teachers, especially ones like SpringNote and PreZentit that go beyond the range of Powerpoint presentations and allow the students to continuing working outside of class and with more creative tools. I would use tools like PreZentit for group math projects for my students to make researching math, an admittedly ominous task, somewhat more interesting. Math classes are not a way for students to express creativity and I think that that detracts from the class, so I would use this tool as a way for them to do so while still learning about math and taking an interest in it.