Flock 1.0 has added a “People” sidebar to support integration with Facebook and Twitter, Flickr and Youtube.

The following are some information from the Flock website:

• Log in to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr or Twitter to activate Flock’s People sidebar
• Easily access the photos and videos your friends have posted to share
• Share web content with them with simple drag and drop actions
• Communicate effortlessly with your contacts across services
• Flock politely notifies you when your friends have posted new content
• Flock provides a unique filmstrip view of your favorite photo and video streams from YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Piczo, Truveo and Facebook
• Easily drag and drop items onto friends, blogs or email for effortless sharing, publishing and communicating
• Search for photos and videos directly from the Media Minibar

Blogging has quickly become one of the most effective learning tools in education today. It introduces students with new methods of communicating, improving their writing, and helps motivate them to find their voice.

Students tend to write about current events, personal beliefs, and topics related to their education.

In blogging, there are no set standards, no boundaries, no restrictions confining you to conform your thoughts to any given set of rules and regulations. You can write freely, and at your own pace.

Also, bloggers can gain an audience from their writing. Unlike a school paper, blog posts can recieve feedback from students, teachers, parents, and ultimately, anyone in the world.

Many teachers have noted that the students would publish to their school blogs even when not instructed to. Students really enjoy reaching out to the world and they are so motivated by it that they want to write even more. They would describe how their day was, what they learned in class, or even things they learned or read on the news that day. It’s amazing.

I also found that many students became so attached to their blogs that they made it a responsibility to keep consistent.

Where to Start

As a first stop, I highly recommend reading SupportBlogging. It will explain what educational blogging is all about, what it means for students and educators, and how you can setup a blog.

Blogs for Learning which is a new site containing in-depth articles on educational blogging and fantastic screencast tutorials showing the ins and outs of various blogging platforms (including WordPress and Blogger).

Be sure to look over the article, “Student Blogging – What You Should Know”.

For teachers and students, I suggest using edublogs.org for blogging as they provide you with a free, hosted blog. They also provide you with a wiki powered by Wikispaces for free.

iPod + broadcast = podcast
Distribute audio (programs) files by subscription
Options: Video podcast & Enhanced (images & links)
Free, asynchronous, portable
Listen whenever/wherever you like – walking, exercising, driving
Subscription – easy to receive
Auto-download of new content
Sync new stuff to iPod or other MP3 players and listen

Ideas:
Weekly Review/News
Student Projects: Tours, audio journal/commentary on books read
Language, Music
Story Reading
Book Reviews
Student Research Presentations
Used to present essential or supplementary material

Subscribing to podcasts:
Find the orange RSS button; Click button or copy URL into your RSS reader.

Why Web 2.0?
· greater efficiency
· changes in student population
· better learning and teaching methods
· allowing greater student independence and autonomy
· greater collaboration

Problems
· accessibility
· visibility and privacy
· data ownership
· control over content
· longevity of data
· data preservation
· staff and student training

The Future
· The broadcast media increasingly adopting Web 2.0 technologies, with greater audience participation and audience created content
· The increased bandwidth will encourage a move from the desktop to mobile devices and browsers. Content will be created, shared and consumed on mobile devices.
· Computing that is always on, will change our everyday digital and media environments, mediating the world in new ways.

Web 2.0 Softwares

Individual systems are hosted on servers and accessed across the web via a browser, they may be interchangeably be called Web 2.0 systems, Web 2.0 services or Web 2.0 applications.

Blogs

· A blog is a system that allows a single author (or a group of authors) to write and publicly display time-ordered articles (called posts). Readers can add comment to posts.
· In schools, students using their individual blogs can build up a corpus of interrelated knowledge via posts and comments, encouraged and facilitated by a teacher.
· Teachers can use a blog for course announcements, news and feedback to students.
· Syndication technologies (RSS feeds) enable groups of learners and teachers to easily keep track of new posts.
Wikis
· A wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build up a body of knowledge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
· Wikis can be used in class projects, and are particularly suited to the production of collaboratively edited material.
· Wikis can be used by teachers to supply scaffolding for writing activities – thus in a group project a teacher can supply page structure, hints as to desirable content, and then provide feedback on student generated content.
· Students can provide feedback on each other’s writing.

Social Bookmarking
· A social bookmarking service provides users the ability to record (bookmark) web pages, and tag those records with significant words (tags) that describe the pages being recorded.
· A good examples is del.icio.us.
· Over time users build up collections of records with common tags, and users can search for bookmarked items by likely tags. Since items have been deemed worthy of being bookmarked and classified with one or more tags, social bookmarking services can sometimes be more effective than search engines for finding Internet resources.
· Users can find other users who use the same tag and who are likely to be interested in the same topic(s).
· In some social bookmarking systems, users with common interests can be added to an individual’s own network to enable easy monitoring of the other users’ tagging activity for interesting items.
· In schools, teachers and learners can build up collections of resources.

Podcasting
· Podcasting is a way in which a listener may conveniently keep up-to-date with recent audio or video content.
· Podcasting is a combination of audio or video content, RSS, and a program that deals with RSS notifications of new content, and playback or download of that new content to a personal audio/video player.
· Vidcasts are video versions of podcasts.
· Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lessons, or, more commonly, to record lectures/lessons and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning.
· Vidcasts can be used to supply to supply videos of laboratory experiments.
· Podcasts can be used to supply audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.

Other Media Sharing
· Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system, such as Flickr.
· The ability to comment on and critique each other’s work.
· Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment.
· FlickrCC is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
· Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video, YouTube and TeacherTube.

Social Networking
· Systems that allow people to network together for various purposes. Examples include Facebook and MySpace, Second Life (virtual world), and Elgg.
· Social networking systems allow users to describe themselves and their interests, and they generally implement notions of friends and communities.
· There are a wide variety of educational experiments being carried out in Second Life. These vary from the mundane with a virtual world gloss to more adventurous experiments that take advantage of the virtual reality.

Collaborative Editing Tools

· These allow users in different locations to collaboratively edit the same document at the same time. Examples are Google Docs (Word processor, Spreadsheets & Presentation) and Gliffy (diagrams online).
· In schools, these can be used for collaborative work over the web, either edited simultaneously or simply to share work edited by different individuals at different times.
· Students from different classes or schools can work on the same document.

Syndication using RSS feeds

· In a world of newly added and updated shared content, it is useful to be able to easily keep up to date with new and changed content, particularly if one is interested in multiple sources of information on multiple web sites.
· A feed reader (sometimes called an aggregator) can be used to centralise all the recent changes in the sources of interest, and a user can easily use the reader/aggregator to view recent additions and changes.
· RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is used to list changes (these lists of changes are called feeds, giving rise to the name feed reader).
· A feed reader displays changes in summary form, and allows the user to see/download the complete changes.
· In a group project where a wiki is being developed collaboratively, RSS feeds can be used to keep all members of the group up to date with changes as they can be automatically notified of changes as they are made.
· Similarly one can be automatically notified of new blog posts made by class members.

Social constructivism

· Social constructivist approaches are particularly aided by Web 2.0 tools as mediating mechanisms between collaborating students and between students and teachers, particularly between students who might be sometimes be working in different places and at different times.
· A group of students might construct an artefact in a wiki, but also be guided by a teacher who provides scaffolding in the same wiki. This scaffolding could take the form of wiki page structure and titles for pages to be filled in by the students, guidance as to areas to discuss in the wiki, the kind of content that is desired, and feedback on existing student produced content.

Possible issues and problems

· Much Web 2.0 based student work is about content sharing and repurposing. This is can easily be seen by students as part of a new teenage copy-and-paste culture that runs counter to traditional notions of plagiarism, and adjustments may need to be made, either to redefine plagiarism (unlikely to occur), or to help students transcend this culture.
· There may be a skills and/or culture crisis as ‘old world’ teachers are forced to use unfamiliar tools and work and in unfamiliar ways and alien environments.
· Not all students may be digitally connected with a computer and Internet connection at home. These students would be at a profound disadvantage in a new world of Web 2.0 enabled learning without specific care being taken to address their needs.

Conclusion

· Web 2.0 will have profound implications for learners and teachers in formal, informal, work-based and life­long education. Web 2.0 will affect how schools and universities go about the business of education, from learning, teaching and assessment, through contact with school communities, widening participation and interfacing with industry.
· However, it would be a mistake to consider Web 2.0 as the sole driver of these changes; instead Web 2.0 is just one part. Other drivers include, for example, pressures to greater efficiency, changes in student population, and ongoing emphasis on better learning and teaching methods.
· Nonetheless, Web 2.0 is a technology with profound potentiality for inducing change in the education sector. In this, the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration, and increased pedagogic efficiency.

Moodle can be used in schools for:

• Sharing Ideas and Resources
• Collaboration between teachers
• Collaboration between students
• Supporting learning
• Create a Learning Community
• Talk about personal experiences using blogs and wikis
• Online discussion using forums and chats
• RSS feeds

Some ideas for using Moodle:

• Simple public web site including news, calendar and resources. Could even have public classroom pages maintained by staff/student.
• Simple intranet with “course sites” allowing resource sharing between groups of teachers etc
• Use of the quiz tool multi-choice, short answer etc
• Older students creating content for teachers & younger students
• A simple publishing tool for audio files (podcasting), using forum or RSS feeds.
• Use wiki‘s to enable students to create simple web pages or a group sites/projects.
• Link lists
• Use forums to give students a sense of audience in their writing.
• Glossary as a simple image gallery.
• Parental access to work.
• Glossaries where children can deliver/share book reviews.
• Use a Wiki as a group preparation/recording tool for a day trip.
• Online journals (blogs) for pupils to record achievements or concerns, for themselves and their teachers.
• Scheduled chat sessions for discussion with students from other schools.

This is only a very small list of what you can do with Moodle. Find out for yourself by exploring Moodle today.

Social Bookmarking in Simple English

Social Networking in Simple English

Wikis in Simple English

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