Friday, March 5, 2010

Steve Dembo and Lindsay Hopins: "Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools"

Web 2.0: Entirely web based, interactive, plays well with others

Crappy Graphs
: This allows quick and easy basic graphs. You can download or embed these graphs.
Wall Wisher: Allows you to put sticky notes on things. This works well for quick, collaborative note taking. You can drag notes around to use like a concept map.
Delicious: Social bookmarking.
Let Me Google That For You: Shows people how to Google. It shows a screencast of typing in terms and pulling up the search terms.
ipadio: Allows quick easy mobile podcasts. You must register to use the site, but there is no charge. The resulting audios have embed codes and automatically makes an iTunes podcast.
Blabberize: Allows you to use any photo and "Blabberize" (make the person/animal) speak. This would work well for having famous people tell autobiographies. The result is an embed code.
Animoto: This is free for one year for educators. It allows you to make music videos using your own videos. You can upload yur own images, rearrange them, add text, highlight images (so they'll stay up longer). You can use your own audio or use the audio they've provided for free. It adds in all the transitions and visual effects so allows students to quickly make the videos. This would work well for a photo collage for a year-end festival.
Wordle: Allows you to create word clouds. If you want to take it to the next level, use Word Sift. In Word Sift, you paste in text. It creates a word cloud that is not as visually appealing as Wordle, but it allows you to interact with the words (e.g., highlight language arts words or social studies). You can choose a single word to bring up a visual thesaurus and the application will also bring in related images from Google images.
Glogster: There are two versions: public and educational. Glogster allows you to create visual e-boards with embedded media (inc., sounds, videos, and pictures).

Notes on this session are available here.