Week 4 Reading Response

Reading Response 4
Web 2.0 is very deep. It’s taking me quite while to fully understand what I am reading and how it can help a 2nd grade teacher. I will continue my quest of web 2.0 by visiting each site and reading about it. The funny thing is that, I bet some of my students may be able to pick up some of this information faster than I can. Why? Today’s students have been raised in a technology world.
This PowerPoint talks about using Google Gadgets that simply puts your favorite site on your blog so your visitors can see what you are interested in. I really need to play with this Google Gadgets so I can have a better understanding of it. This PowerPoint also deals with participation application.
Participation Applications
What makes all of these internet- blogs, podcasting, social networking, videos, and photo sharing etc.-so exciting? What draws people to them? Our world is becoming a participation culture. All of these sites attract people to them by how they are set up and how easy it is to access them. The way sites and blogs are set up is amazing; a viewer starts on one site reading about information of bears and end up on another site that has videos of bears in the Alaska. Believe me, you can easily spend hours on the web and not even realize it. Every site and/or blogs seems to have links to other sites that gives more information on the subject. There are several parts in the networking world: the most popular ones (I believe!) to the students of today are the social software and the Gaming/Virtual worlds. The two I found useful for the classroom is social software and media sharing. These two can easily be use in a classroom for lessons and/or projects. With blogs, students can create a site that shows who they are and display what they have learned. These blogs would be a great way for parents to see what their child is actually learning in school and what really interests them. Teachers could use this as an interactive journal and respond to their writings. Blogging is the new way of socializing with people around the world and from state to state. Blogging would be a great way for students to communicate with a pen pal from another state or country. There would be more writing going on; it could be happening daily instead of waiting for snail mail and only writing every other week. As a teacher, you may have a student who hates to write, but for some reason typing on a computer sparks his or her interest and may start to write. Using blogs are great with children as long as you monitor the site they are on and don’t sign up for ones that you can’t lock people out. The best blogs are ones that has a system that only allows certain people on which as a teacher would list the individuals. The teacher should also have an administrator lock on it so that students can’t get to it.
Media creation and sharing is a great way to share photos and pod casts. Pod casts is the wave of the future, but so many teachers don’t know anything about it or have the equipment at their school to make one. Pod cast could motivate students to want to share their poems and stories. It’s a great tool to use to share students work to parents. What I like about pod casts is that students can experience Alaska through a pod cast or learn about ocean life through an experience biologist through their pod cast.
So, Participation Applications is a great tool for teachers to use in all subjects and strategies. It’s all about how you want to use it and how much you know about how to use it effectively for the classroom.