Web 2.0 or the read/write web

Web 2.0 or the read/write web has a number of educational possibilities. Here are a few.

Google Earth
Great for giving kids a real understanding of geography. They love seeing their own house from space. See placespotting for a fun geography game based on Google Earth. Google Earth now allows star viewing. I have used Skyglobe (DOS program) for a number of years.
See a sneak preview of Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope

Thanks Bill & Roland for extra astronomy links
http://www.rmit.edu.au/scienceweek/eratosthenes
http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/gkastr1.html
http://www.samtsai.com/p468 (scroll down for video)
http://www.techdo.com/images/largest-know-star.htm (slides)

Bureau of Meteorology
www.bom.gov.au
Great radar and satellite images. Note some schools have an online weather station, Westall Secondary College and Emerald Primary School

Blogs
· can be maintained by students and used to reflect on their learning
· can be maintained by the teacher for students
· can be used by teachers to share pedagogy

Student blog see the blogroll on the LHS of http://gamedesign11.wordpress.com/ Year 11 student blogs

Blog by year 3 teacher for his students

my blog,
my favorite edubloggers:
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/
http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke
http://learninggames.wordpress.com/

Reflection and the Middle School Blogger: Do Blogs Support Reflective Practices?
“Research examined 12 randomly selected blogs from a population of 38 teacher-created, teaching-centered blogs to determine whether they were useful reflective devices for practicing middle school teachers. The amount and depth of reflective practice, as measured by a researcher-created rubric, was examined as well. Results indicated that all participants engaged in some level of reflective writing. However, the depth and level of reflection varied within and among the blogs. The results reported here are useful for framing future research on the efficacy of middle school teacher blogs.”

RSS feeds can be used to track new postings to your favourite blogs e.g.
Bloglines is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.

Wikis
Kids love vandalising their school's Wikipedia entry. Is this good learning or just a teachable moment? Apart from Wikipedia (which Nature Magazine found to be almost as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica ) you can create your own educational wiki. E.g. http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/

Social bookmarking
Teachers are communicators. A teacher argues why we should share. Its always good to see who is bookmarking the stuff you see as important, see what else they bookmark. My bookmarks

Youtube
Kids will respond well to a relevant and authentic task. Publishing for the whole world makes it pretty real – authentic.
Guitar, 37 million views
History Legomation

There are also heaps of online lessons there
my stuff

Online games
A list of the educational benefits of playing World of Warcraft
The credibility you get with the kids when you say you are a level 52 Dwarf Priest is truly amazing.

Facebook and Myspace
Pretty much useless so far, but see above on credibility. Teachers can have their own Myspace or Facebook and be more in touch with what kids are doing.

Secondlife
Lag City unless you have a really fast connection. Largely wasted on recreating “talk and chalk” classrooms but has lots of potential as a creative space. See http://del.icio.us/tonyforster/secondlife (me: Australis Gondwana)

Flickr
Photosharing http://www.flickr.com


Finally
A series of videos explaining things like RSS , blogs and social bookmaking in Plain English