Web+2.04

Wonderful things about the Web In touring the web 2.0 assignment I found several new tools to use for my future teaching projects and even with my school assignments now. There have been several advancements on the web since the 1990’s. There are new tools all over to help people find information and new ways to teach and present their information. The first website I found to be very helpful and interesting was the Prezi website. It is a detailed website that shows new ways to present information so it keeps your students interested. In a Prezi presentation you can zoom in and out of each slide, or pan across your entire presentation, or set it up to explain different formulas in an easy way. I like the Prezi because it is a more exciting way to present information or work together on an assignment as a group. I would use this is my classroom for many things. I could use it to have the students brainstorm an experiment or to brainstorm what they think might happen in a story, or also to create a story line. In the Prezi demonstration it shows how you can use different groupings and laying techniques to show different things. With that I would group the different ideas the students had on each experiment for example, then we could pan out the entire idea and see the results in an organized legible fashion. The next tool on the web I find fascinating is youtube. Youtube is great for entertainment for many age groups but it has also been very educational for me. You can use youtube for your students to do research on several topics. There is information about everything on youtube, especially past news reports or CNN presentations from years ago that can help students with research. Using youtube I would pick a topic for my students to research that would be valuable to our lesson for the week and have them find as much as they could about it from the past and the present. The next great tool I have found and used on the internet is google documents. This website is a great way for students and teachers to store and documents or assignments they may have or need to see in the future. This is wonderful because it can save all of your work so you can continue working on an assignment even from another computer. It can also be helpful because in case of your computer crashing you can reopen your document in google documents from another computer and still have all your information. When I become a teacher I will have my students save their work here so they will always have it to turn in on time and for future reference. Another tool that would be useful to many students and teachers on the web is PBworks. This website is a place for businesses and schools and students to put their work on display or to save it for future need. This would be a fantastic website for students and parents. I would have my students submit their assignments though this website so their parents could have a way to check what their student is submitting. This would also be a very great tool to see how a student advances their skills throughout their educational career, by having everything they have done over the years all in one file that will never be deleted or lost. On this website you can also have many people online looking and proofreading or editing an assignment all at the same time. The last web tool I found to help with teaching that I will talk about is a website called starfall. This is a website geared more towards little children at the lower elementary level. This website has many ways to learn how to read and how to sound out individual letters and how to make it all fun. This is an interactive website so if I was using this particular website to teach in my classroom I would have it set up as a fun interactive center where the students could work by themselves to learn. This website shows ways to pronounce each letter in a word and then teaches kids the whole word. Some little kids are nervous to admit they don’t know some letters or words so I think it would be a great tool to have in the classroom to allow them to learn what they still need help with. There are many wonderful tools out there today that can help with learning and teaching. The internet is a fun and easy way to get the students involved in what they are learning especially when they get to be a part of the learning process by finding everything out for themselves. The internet can be hard to navigate but with the new programs and websites out there it is pretty easy to do just about anything or find anything on the web.