Web+2.0

Web 2.0 is a great tool to make education fun and more convenient for both teacher and students. Before sites like Google Docs and Black Board, sharing papers meant attaching it to emails and sending it back and forth making conversations and important tasks more drawn out and more difficult to keep track of. Google Docs and these other sites make it easier for people to collaborate and share ideas and information. Students and teachers can both benefit from web 2.0 from all that it offers. Web 2.0 also makes learning fun; students can make very creative group presentations and have many different sites to choose from. Web 2.0 makes relaying information to students more visually interesting and helps keep students attention. Web 2.0 is also a great way to use multi-media in the class and make the lesson more accessible to all students. The five tools I would like to incorporate into my classroom are Web Poster Wizard, Slideboom, Apture, Prezi and Do You Buzz. First Web Poster Wizard would be the most useful for a teacher. I would like to create a teacher home page for my students. My home page would have all my lessons and worksheet available on the homepage for students that are absent and need to make up work. I also would have useful links for the students to have age appropriate information resources and other helpful links. A homepage will also be useful for parents to get involved in their child’s education. Apture would be a great aid to add to my class home page, it would allow me to add links and embeds. I would be able to have each of my worksheets and hand out notes on embedded. Apture would also allow me to add images and relevant videos to my lesson plans to enhance the information. It will also allow me to add maps, music, documents, and presentations. Apture would make my home page very easy to navigate and give student many different options to choose from. Having all of these different resources at my students’ finger tips would allow me to reach out and relate to all different types of leaners. There would be visuals, audio, text, and videos that the student would be able to access whenever it is most convenient with their schedules. Slideboom is a really great tool for teachers that like to use PowerPoint. This tool allows people to share PowerPoint presentations online and it plays with audio. When students are sitting in a lecture and trying to take notes and write down everything the teacher is saying, the students actually learn less because they are not able to sit and try to process then retain the information. Having the PowerPoint presentation available after the lecture gives the student the opportunity to review and listen to the lesson more than once and as needed. Having the option would enable the student to retain the information and give them the comfort of knowing that they can always go back and review a section if they need to. I would like to use this for my students, but the only negative aspect would be that the students would get the idea that it would be ok to skip class because they can get the notes online. To counter this, I would have an attendance policy that counted as percentage of the overall grade and make the PowerPoint’s available 24 hours after my lecture. Prezi and PowerPoint are very similar concepts, but Prezi is more visually engaging and you are able to present information and relate it back to the main lesson being taught. It is good to give students more than one option when creating projects. Having multiple options keeps students interested and gives them motivation to work harder by having the freedom to express themselves. I would like to encourage student to use Prezi and PowerPoint so they can be comfortable with using different presentation tools and give them knowledge for the future. The main difference between PowerPoint and Prezi is that Prezi presents the information in a nonlinear way. The last tool I would like to use is Do You Buzz which is a great site for professional templates. I plan on teaching secondary special education and part of the curriculum is transition services, being able to teach students how to write a resume would be very helpful with transition services. There are many useful tools to use with Web 2.0, this tool makes sharing document, PowerPoints, Videos, and other information convenient. Overall Web 2.0 is a very fun and exciting tool to use in the classroom, it will be beneficial for my-self and the students. I am excited to use all of these tools to help me teach students and present my curriculum in a fun and exciting way.
 * Web 2.0 Education**

**Reflection **
==**This was the most enlightening assignment for me; there are so many different Web 2.0 tools I had no idea about. There are tons of different tools available to me that would make teaching fun and engaging. Some of the tools will also help me make information more accessible to students. **==