ISTE 2011: Web 2 Smackdown

First up in Philadelphia for us was the EdubloggerCon on Saturday June 25th.  This was a great chance to meet up with friends and learn new things.

These are my notes from the web 2.0 smackdown.  If you have been using any of these feel free to add links to your work through the comments.....

Web 2.0 Smackdown - Organized by Lisa Thumann

Shapeways.com
3D printing software

http://stencyl.com/
Scratch kind of website for making games

 



screenr.com
records whatever screen you're on

 



jotform.com
create forms that go straight to your Drop Box








notaland.com
kinda like prezi

Casual Collaboration.

Mash your ideas and media together with friends in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and enjoy an interactive chat with more than 50 friends. 

answergarden.ch
no login required so great for school kids.  Create quick surveys

AnswerGarden is a new minimalistic feedback tool. Use it as a tool for online brainstorming or embed it on your website or blog as a poll or guestbook.

scoopit.com
Find web2 tools, post it on the website. Kinda like netvibes or iGoogle

Be The Curator of Your Favorite Topic!

Create your topic-centric media by collecting gems among relevant streams

Publish it to your favorite social media or to your blog

 






lucidchart.com
Create organiser diagrams and mind maps online.  They give all educators free pro accounts.
Diagrams Done Right

We have rethought and redesigned the entire diagramming process to make it as easy as possible. Draw flow charts, wireframes, UML diagrams, and more with just a few clicks.

HTML5 and web standards make LucidChart fast, smooth, and reliable.

Collaborative. Work simultaneously with as many people as you want.

 






qwertytown.com
Keyboarding game. A social network.  Teach your kids to type.  Can limit the social network to the level you are comfortable with
30 day free trial. Also teaches Internet safety as they play

QwertyTown teaches keyboarding, an essential component of literacy for today's students.

Reinforces skills through safe online communication

Addresses Common Core Literacy Standards

Entirely web based

Customizable for learners with different abilities

 






class.io
A way to host your class within Google Apps.  Kinda like teacher dashboard but much more limited



Bo.lt
Connect with People through the Pages you Share
allows you to take any URL and create a unique one

 






shmoop.com
Learning guides
eg literature.  Allows students to choose a novel and has masses of information about the book.  Free text to speech so they can listen to this as well.



present.me
a really easy way to present and share your presentations
If you can’t see a presenter’s face their impact reduces by 55%!

Present.Me is a community for easily recording & sharing your presentations. If you’re a business – it could be to share within your own private space with your employees and customers, or publicly on www.present.me to market to your prospects and collect leads.

Present.Me combines video, audio and your presentations in an easy and intuitive way, so your audience get to see and hear your message in the way it was intended. We’ve built the whole process with ease of use in mind, there’s no need to download specialist software – it’s all there in your browser already. And because it’s online, you can instantly share it with anyone you like, anywhere in the world.

gamesalad.com
Make games with GameSalad Creator
Create games for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and HTML5. No coding involved. All drag and drop. Similar to scratch. Embed code available for blogs portfolio etc. No flash, all html5

 






storybird.com
Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
Read them like books, play them like games, and send them like greeting cards.
Create a story with their clip art. Keep adding pages. Collaborative storytelling. Embed on web.  

 




mycybertwin.com/
Create your own cyber twin.  Possibly fun for adults, but kids would have to give it way too much information to make it effective - unless you were doing an embellishment genre for writing, then it may be great fun!

 




popplet.com
combination of glogster and prezi
Check out Amanda's great post about how she uses Popplet here.

 




pixlr.com
Online image editor for the masses
Edit photos online. Kinda like photoshop express online

 



oneword.com
Online vocal builder and enhancer. They give you a word, you write as much as you can about it in the time allocated ie one minute.

You’ll see one word at the top of the following screen.

you have sixty seconds to write about it.

click ‘go’ and the page will load with the cursor in place.

don’t think. just write.

Then type in name and email and submit it.  Then you can see what eveyone else has written.
 





weekinrap.com
Flocab gives you the last week in current events in rap

 




flocabulary.com
hip hop in the classroom for vocabulary

Flocabulary produces educational hip-hop music and engaging curricular materials to teach academic content for grades K-12. The programs are proven to raise scores on state reading tests and are being used in over 10,000 schools nationwide. Heralded as "groundbreaking" and "necessary," Flocabulary has been featured on The Today Show, Oprah & Friends, and MTV.

Web 2 policies for schools

Last week I spent a couple of hours working with the principals from our cluster of schools to update our existing policies around the way our students and teachers work in our Manaiakalani projects. It is not enough to call them internet policies because they also encompass the local television, public televison, and podcasts through iTunes that our students participate in. At the moment I am calling them policies for 21st century learning and teaching.

I am fortunate to work with a group of principals who are very supportive of the big picture idea of providing a 21st century learning environment. They also are aware that they need to keep up to speed with what is currently happening in their schools and in schools around the world who are working in this way. And that it is a big ask.

Two hours is not long enough to do more than scratch the surface of this topic, but the idea we did discuss in depth is the one I have depicted in the image below. When people start to talk about policies around blogs for example, the idea many seem to have is of a blog being like a book, a movie or even a webpage with all the elements contained within the page/screen you are looking at. So you write a policy about who can do do what on a blog, who owns the content, who moderates it etc and you are finished, right? No, you're not...

The beauty of a blog (and of course a wiki works in the same way) is the ability to embed elements from all the cool Web 2 tools we can lay our hands on. And this means student images, movies, and other content is possibly spread over a dozen or more accounts on the internet. The image I have created below is of a blog I started in 2007 for Korero Pt England, the KPE podcasts. I went through it and included all the sites that are currently feeding into the one blog....This means the agreement our schools develop needs to encompass students and teachers using or uploading student content to all these places - and the latest ones we will discover tomorrow.
As we have pointed out many times, the predator concerns are a minor possibility. There are far more likely scenarios of why we need to have a clear knowledge of where our student images and other content is being hosted. eg a parent walks into the school and says that due to an incident at home her children are now under a protection order and they can't have any images displayed online which may identify their whereabouts. Removing them from a blog or the school website should be simple. But if there are other sites hosting these images too they also may need to be accessed. As a facilitator I have worked with teachers who when you ask them to log into xxxx account online have forgotten their username or password, often because they clicked 'save my name/password'!
Some simple solutions we have agreed to;
All accounts are owned by adults (teachers or parents) and this saves us from concerns about the age restrictions as well;
All account emails used to sign up are the school domain ones if they are involving school students (so I don't use my xtra account or hotmail)
All usernames and passwords EITHER use a designated schoolwide username and password OR are kept in a secure database maintained by a senior manager of the school.
These solutions for 21st century learning and teaching are not intended to restrict the creativity and innovation of the teachers, but rather to protect them and their students.

This post is long enough. More discussion to come...

Move over Post-Its, Bring on Wallwisher

One of my happy discoveries recently has been Wallwisher - a nifty little Web 2 app that can be useful to adults and students. I first heard about it from Nik Peachey when he shared his wall of useful Web 2 tools for teachers. This wall is worth a visit for the content on it, even if you are not interested in wallwisher. I discovered it the week after our unconference, #may09 in Auckland, and immediately wished I'd known about it then.
We had put a bit of structure around the unconference by giving everyone Post-its to jot ideas down on and then we attempted to sort them. We did get there in the end but we had Post-its all over the floor at one stage!

The next PD session I did with staff in the week following that experience I gave away the Post-its idea because I had discovered wallwisher. Instead everyone sat at their laptops and clicked away on the wall I had built adding their thoughts to the brainstorm. We had a very short space of time in which to organise a large event for our combined schools' staff and using this method we managed to come to a concensus and get planned very quickly. We had 17 people contributing at once and it handled that number fine. The owner of the page could start organising the 'stickies' as people uploaded them and everyone else could hit 'refresh' at any time on their own browser to keep up with the ideas other people were contributing.
But I also see times when it could be great with kids. One of the things we are working on in literacy is expanding the sentences our students write. I sat in on a PD session with Jannie Van Hees who gets kids in groups to work on sheets of paper to take a basic sentence and expand it by adding to the beginning, then the end and finally 'exploding' it in the middle. We thought that our kids would enjoy each group gathering around a computer and adding their contributions to a wall, as a different way of doing this.
Caution: These walls are either 'all on' (anyone can contribute) or 'all off' (only the owner can post). To use them with students particularly you would have to use the RSS feed from it and monitor it carefully as anyone can post on it.

Thanks to Fiona Grant for the photo from the unconference.