Meet my friend: Web 2.0

Information taken from: http://whatis.techtarget.com/

Web 2.0 is the current state of the old World Wide Web (WWW). The main difference is its social nature; Internet users are content providers and not just passive consumers. They can share information, interact and collaborate with others. In education, this tool can benefit teachers making lessons more creative and attractive for students (creating videos, posters, cartoons, and sharing them with others). Teachers need to be aware of their students, who are immersed in a digital world. 

Here are some practical ideas to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom:

The easy-going and free Big Huge Labs page allows students to create many things (posters, calendars, puzzles). In pairs, they will create a movie poster including pictures and a list of vocabulary we dealt with. This list should be presented as credits (they will write full sentences using their previous knowledge, avoiding writing isolated words). The picture they choose will be the poster background image and the title will be created considering an outstanding concept they consider they learnt. The purpose of this is to assess and enhance self assessment of what they’ve learnt through this unit. They will share this poster on Edublog, a blog we’ve chosen since it is an appealing and easy-to-use web page. You can create an account and share your material in private learning groups. The pair will design and manage this blog, sharing responsibility and uploading different materials to be shared with others. After this, their peers will reply to this entry and state whether they will go and watch this movie or not (i.e. if they agree or not), and why.

In conclusion, considering the students of this digital generation and the call for creativity and motivation, we believe that teachers should overcome their fear of technology and try it out, enjoying the rewards.

New tricks for an old dog.

We believe that the role of presentations is a creative and engaging way to introduce a topic/task/project to our students. Although presentations can be used at any stage in the lesson and for many different purposes, we focus on the role they have when it comes to presenting something new. Usually, teachers do not use presentations because for them to create something like that is time consuming and may be useless. Based on our experiences, we can say that teachers need to look at these tools in a friendlier way.

Also, presentations can help students to visualize what they are asked to do. When teachers work with projects (like we do), sometimes students are not able to see or to imagine what their production will look like, so this is a way of motivating them, by showing them something  concrete and similar to what they will produce.

In our didactic sequence, we tried to incorporate new technologies. We asked students to use the Movie Maker software to make their videos, which consist of a fictitious holiday of a well-known celebrity.

Our aim is to use this new technology, by means of which students can be more creative in their productions. They can add images, short videos, music, and text which will be clues for their partners to guess who the celebrity is - things that would be impossible to put altogether without using this software. So, according to SAMR, this is what we gain when we ask them to replace the old technologies. With the type of task we designed, we think the ladder that this model proposes is covered.

Taking into account the TPACK model, the tool we chose did all what we needed it to. It is simple enough, but if students don’t know some of its features we can give them some tutorial so as to clear doubts.

Our sequence provides guidance to our students, it is clear and goes from simpler tasks to more difficult ones. We don’t want to frustrate them. 

We provide some of the information that they will need, but they also have to look for some more in order to fulfil the task – we want to teach them some learning strategies, one of them is selecting important or relevant information. At the same time we want our students to develop autonomy and to be responsible for their learning processes.

We believe that this software fits the type of task that we want them to do, and even though we are aware that there might be other software more appropriate for this, we prefer this one since it is really simple to use when making videos.

As we worked with Valeria and Belén, here you have their blog. You can visit it and there you will find the video we use to present our project and also a webpage where you can find information about the software we use: The Movie Maker.

This is an image that illustrates the TPACK model. It was made with a web 2.0 resource.

But we will talk about this in our next entry...