This week I will be describing Web 2.0 tools for both my use and the use of my students. Diigo has been a terrific tool for me. I’m thinking it is more than my second graders need. But if I were to teach students a little bit older, I think I would sign up for the educator account. I used to have a hard time keeping track of the great websites I had found and bookmarked. Diigo has changed all that because it allows the user to put multiple tags on a website and organize them in lists. Another great feature is that you can share the sites you choose with others. You can share not only the site but your tags, comments and highlights.  My group did this a lot while working on our group project. I am always sharing sites with other teachers at my school site. This site will make it so much easier to do that. I love the highlighting feature. Last year I used to print out web articles because I wanted to highlight important sections and write notes in the margins. I don’t need to print out web sites and articles anymore because Diigo has highlighting and sticky notes features.

Diigo’s introductory video asserts “you are what you annotate.” In terms of social networking, this aspect of Diigo’s social bookmarking helps you to connect with others. There is a description of the Diigo bookmarking tools in Blogs, Wikis, Podcast, and Other Powerful Web Tools by Will Richardson.  I also like the WebSlides, a show of websites in a list. I haven’t used all the features in Diigo yet but it is a great site to know about.

I am going to try Edmodo with my second graders. The site says it was built for teachers and students. It was “built with the privacy of students in mind.” It was easy to set up my side of the Edmodo account. My students weren’t in school this week so they are not signed up. Students are asked to sign themselves up and I think this would be good practice for them. It looks fun and I think students would like to know that they are actually micro blogging.  I can add links of useful websites for them and some of the PowerPoint presentations and videos that I use in class. My students often enjoy watching the PowerPoint presentations and videos over again. This would be an easy way to allow them to do this. There is a lot of great information in the section “Read about Edmodo on…TechCrunch, Mashable, Instructify, Box of Tricks, and Mr. Warner.com.”  Mr. Warner wrote, I can make the homework / spelling posts on Edmodo public (simply by ticking one box), so that the parents can see what their child is expected to achieve and when it is due.” This is a great idea. I think I will try it too. It will help those students that lose their homework and keep parents more informed.

The second site I would like to review is Wikispaces. My district prefers wikispaces for teachers to make their classroom websites.  This site is free for teachers and you can have more that one account. I like the fact that wikispaces can be private. I have parents that have concerns about having their child’s face on the web. Of course you need parent permission to include their child. I didn’t see any requirement that students need to be 13 to use it. Since I know that many primary teachers let their kids post things on their wiki, I am thinking that it must be okay. Another teacher lets her second grade students post on the wiki. I have not done that yet. I am just at the point of starting to post the work of the students whose parents have given permission. I have posted many resources for my students on my classroom website wikispace.

Group 2’s wikispace was a good collaboration tool for our group project. I can now see the value of wikispaces as a collaboration tool. Since my class website wiki is private, I created another wikispace to show other (especially primary) teachers some great resources for them and their students.

I have not done much with publishing yet. I loved Gcast when it was free and so did my kids. When we were coming home from our field trip two weeks ago, my cell phone was passed around by the students and everyone that wanted to report got a chance. Unfortunately, you can no longer make podcasts by phone for free anymore. I will now look into recording on my computer and adding it to Gcast. I used GCast when I created a virtual field trip on Google Earth and when I made a sample podcast to describe for parents a technology project their children would be participating in at school. Gcast is very easy to use. The Gcast website has a lot of good information under Podcasting 101.