Learn the Lingo

Want to be up to speed with all of your technology savvy colleagues? Here are some important terms to help you out.

Web 2.0
The term “Web 2.0″ refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

Social-networking
A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Some social networking sites include: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin

Folksonomy
(also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging.[1] In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[2] Folksonomy (from folk + taxonomy) is a user-generated taxonomy.

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Examples include: delicious, dig

Blog
A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting), which are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, one which consists of blogs with very short posts.

Plug-in
In computing, a plug-in (also: plugin, addin, add-in, addon, add-on, snap-in or snapin; but see also extension) consists of a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function “on demand”.  Applications support plugins for many reasons.

 

 

My Maps – Google Maps

One of the VHS teachers asked me to do a tutorial on how to set up a custom map in Google Maps. She wants to put a marker for all of her students’ high schools with links to their websites in her custom map. We discussed the other possibilities of making a custom google map. In Social Studies it could be used to mark different battle grounds, in Science it could be used to mark tornadoes in a season, the possibilities are endless.

My Maps can be customized with place markers, videos, images, html, text, and more.

So, I created this map of the places in Europe I visited while I was living in Greece in college. You can make maps public or private (I made mine public)

 
View Larger Map

 
STEP 1
Create a google account if you don’t have one (www.google.com)

STEP 2
Do a search for “MY MAPS” or click here: http://maps.google.com/maps

STEP 3
Create a map. Post the link below, or if you have a blog, post it in your blog and post the link below.

EXTENSION
Create a map to integrate into one of your lessons.

Brand New Google Earth 5.0

Enjoy a guided tour of the sites of ancient Rome from the comfort of your desktop. From the Colosseum to the ruins of the Temple of Minerva, each placemark offers a brief history of the specific location.

Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. This is great for all grade levels K-12. You can upload your model right to youtube.com.

Google Docs

There are countless free resources Google offers. One of the is Google Docs. As an educator and as a business owner I use Google Docs every day because everything is stored online for me.

Blogs

What is a blog? Well, this… you are on a blog right now, WordPress is a type of blog. Many people use blogs as a diary of their daily activity. The definition is:

iPODs and iTUNES

What a toy for a teaching tool? Consider the following…

RSS & Google Reader

RSS feeds are something you can subscribe to like news, blog posts etc… that will come to you in your reader. Google Reader is an aggregate for reading RSS feeds. They work together.

Web 2.0 Tools & Why to use them in the 21st Century Classroom

Web 2.0: a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of ‘the web. Web 2.0 tools are free and accessible from any computer around the world.