Web+2.0

  If we can find a way to integrate the new coming technologies into our teaching, we can help our kids to extend their learning and empower their creativity. It is also a way to enhance your innovative skills as a teacher in designing lessons or creating new projects with your kids.

Using Web 2.0 tools in school may seem difficult to implement but the results can be fruitful. There are enough online tools to bring technology into your classes that can make your children inspire, excite and make connection with the rest of the world. Here are my 5 favorite tools for teachers of very young learners: Second life is a great tool to create a personalized speaking avatar. You can customize your character, change the background. You record your voice or use text to speech to make your avatar speak. Second life avatars can be used to improve listening and speaking abilities. We can use it as an introduction, recording a message for our students, different role-play activities, and pronunciation of target vocabulary. Kids would love to create their own avatars, recording their voices and listening to it. Slide is a must-use tool in all elementary classes classes. It’s a great way to integrate technology into storytelling. It allows you to combine voice, text, video, and images to create a digital story. Once you create the voice thread, others can also leave comments on it by recording, filming or writing a text. Voice thread is also a great opportunity to collaborate with other students from all over the world. Kids can draw their own pictures and talk about it, or create their own stories and record their voices while telling it to others. They can talk about their animals by putting their pictures on a slide on voice thread or families. We can record our voices and read stories to kids to listen at home. This tool can help our kids to improve their listening, speaking and writing skills. Google docts, is a tool to create online posters adding different multimedia on it. You can write, grab or record audio and video files; you can upload pictures and use numerous graphics by changing them in size and colors. You can add videos from [|__SchoolTube__] directly on your blog. With all the colors, graphics and the multimedia, Google docts is a lovely tool to introduce new topics, create collaborative projects, online posters, invitation letters, and timelines. You can embed your blog to your class blogs or wikis. This is what makes Google docts outstanding alongside with its visual impact. This will become a favorite in my class. This one was a no brainer really. Blogs have changed the way we communicate and share information. While blogs are more like someone giving a presentation, they at least provide a great opportunity for Q&A. This will help teachers know exactly what is going on with the school. Blogs are a

Prezi is a great tool for any classroom, making power points fun and interactive. Research as shown that people do not remember liner ideas as well as multi dimensional, meaning color and movement. This would be great to add to the classroom to teach all types of lessons one in particular math. Going to the website Prezi, I came across a quote “My students some of whom can’t seem to learn algebra CAN seem to learn complex video games that require logic, memorization, teamwork and strategy.” Games are defined as “a stimulating or a formal system where choices and rules are important, allows you to practice patterns and permutation of patterns. Using this definition of games applies to the same way people learn. All children love to play games so if we can incorporate more games the more children will love to learn. As teachers we need to know that learning is not linear, math books are. Another problem with linear learning students often get stuck because of one concept. Using web 2.0 we can teach the children concepts and then bring in games to practice and become efficient, so they really understand the meaning while making learning fun!