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Exploration of Web 2.0 Tools A mere short sample, but with ideas By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Saturday, April 2, 2016 Post 245
Web 2.0 tools and their systematic and corresponding analysis to visualize where they can fit in our instructional design is a must and a necessity for the 21 st Century teaching professional. While taking an online course on Exploring Web 2.0 facilitated by Prof. Michael Krauss from the Lewis & Clark University in Portland, USA, one gets to deepen the importance of the gamut of possibilities we have to explore and then to use in one’s teaching. And though Prof. Krauss wanted his course participants to express which of the many activities we had during the second week of his training we like the most, it is very difficult to isolate one and say, “This is better than the rest.” In spite of knowing the existence of Voki.Com and having shallowly explored its content, Prof. Krauss’s activity prompted me into deepening my comprehension of the tool. Voki.Com is a webpage that allows the user to create an avatar, which can easily
be embedded into many different Internet-based html-supported environments. Creating this kind of avatars, and thinking ahead for my next term of in college, I was wondering how ELT students coursing literature can use this to create some sort of storytelling with a real narrator, whether is with one of the voices provided by the system or with their own recordings. And this is just one idea that came to me.
Understanding
the
importance
of
collaboration
in
today’s
education
blended/hybrid formats, Diigo.Com, Google Sites, and Jumble Puzzle can be very much handy. In college, learners are often looking for information when developing projects, topic analyses, group work, and so on. The exchange of websites they come across in their online searches can be much faster if all partners do hold a Diigo account. In my case, what I see now is to use Diigo to share links, articles, videos, and the like by creating specific “groups” interested in a given topic, literary genre, short story, etc. It is indeed a great tool. Collaboration can be taken to a higher level through a wiki format, like the one developed by Prof. Krauss in Google Sites. Depending on the topic to cover along a course, having students collaborate on a single document, usually divided into sections, is a great idea for learners. In this way, pieces of the summary can be created by
individual students or teams. Questions can be posted to partners developing a given part of the document and they can get peer coaching from them for better understanding. No doubt that this has great potential to be used with digital natives in higher education. Something that came to me by surprise is Jumble Puzzles from Jumble.Com. Puzzles are always fun, and fun can be taken into the classroom to try to find a solution with one’s students. This site provides you with a daily Jumble Puzzle and contains an archive of puzzles for us to explore. The advantage of this site is that one can try to solve it first and then, with the answers tucked under the arm, one can walk and play with words with one’s learners. If everything is instructionally planned carefully, I am sure that all of these Web 2.0 resources, free of charge and ready to be used, can be of great help for one’s courses, whether they are in high school or in higher education. I just look forward to having some time to start constructing my new learning tasks around these Web 2.0 tools.