Love SP!

Check out this wonderful video profiling the Lower School at St. Paul's School. Congratulations to the talented people (you know who you are) who worked so hard on this..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNDytjfjVU&feature=colike

Let the work begin!

I look forward to the work that begins tomorrow for a group of 17 talented and experienced teachers at St. Paul's School. They will begin a year long in depth exploration of STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - and Global education initiatives: examination of our current practice and recomendation for future enhancement.

Follow their progress on the St. Paul's ARC wiki (under Favorite Links).

Web 2.0 DEFINED

Is Web 2.0 an upgrade to Web 1.0?

Not technically...but it is a term coined (O'Reilly Media, 2003) to describe enhanced applications that are now ubiquitious on the web. Web 2.0 specifially refers to web apps that are participatory in nature - via information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration. Examples of Web 2.0 sites include social networking sites, video and photo sharing sites, wikis, blogs and any other site where users contribute to the content - users are prosumers vs. consumers.

What is Web 2.0?

We'll discuss several of these apps when we cover Web 2.0 - stay tuned!

Time Flies!

Okay, so two years have passed since my last entry. Pretty pathetic. In the two years since my last entry I completed graduate school (Loyola U in Maryland, M.Ed), whew, continued work full time as the Directory of Technology at St. Paul's School, and have added teaching (undergrad Intro to Education - tech course at Loyola U) in my spare time.

This resurrection of the Web 2.0 blog is in response to that class. For the past year, I've been teaching a general technology curriculum to Loyola students that includes a day of PowerPoint training. Virtually every college student today has used PPT many, many times. However, many of these future teachers may not be familiar with the plethora of Web 2.0 technologies available to them. I will use this forum to dust off the old and intro the new. Welcome!

RSS Uses in the Classroom

Will Richardson had a great suggestion for using RSS effectively in the classroom. He suggests, in the Practical Use for Educators , that teachers use Google Alerts and RSS to search for and feed website updates - an invaluable tool for those following daily updates on a particular topic.

I thought this would be useful for my critical information literacy project so that I can track today's updates on the Election and coverage of Barack Obama and John McCain. I setup Google Alerts to update my RSS Aggregator (SharpReader) every time there is an update on Google for "Election 2008", "Barack Obama" and "John McCain".

The benefit to using the RSS feed and not e-mail is that I don't need to flood my inbox every time there is a Google post for my topics. Rather, with an RSS feed, I have the ability to quickly scan a list of updates, and I can choose to read those which are relevant and interesting. Check it out.

Friendfeed - Is it useful in the classroom?

I think Friendfeed is a useful educational tool for two reasons. First, Friendfeed acts as an aggregator, or RSS feed, of its own, gathering all entries made in various Web 2.0 services into one central location. If a student or colleague with whom I am collaborating posts a picture on Flickr, or bookmarks a site on Diigo, I will see immediately just by visiting one site.

With Friendfeed, I have the ability to create a private Room for my students. This will help limit the discussion to our particular group and enable me as the teacher and the student group to easily view info without having to sift through non relevant entries from others.

Friendfeed is a great tool for telecollaborative projects. Teachers can setup rooms that include students from multiple schools or rooms for colleagues in a particular discipline. Friendfeed can be used as the starting point, enabling students and teachers to do a quick check for updates before wasting unnecessary time trying to track down who did updates and where.

Check out some other Friendfeed uses from this Digital Inspiration blog entry titled "FriendFeed Tips: Do You Use All The Great Features of Friend Feed?"