#5 Web 2.0

Web 2.0 websites are a second generation of websites that allow for sharing and interaction among users. Blogs, twitter, and DIIGO are all web 2.0 tools that would be helpful in the clasrrom for students as well as support teacher development. Blogs can be used by students to help share ideas with each other on given topics, and teachers can use this tool to promote idea interaction. Twitter is a great tool for both students and teachers. For students, twitter can allow them to directly interact with first hand information, such as a class tweeting to a museum or an author, and it would allow for great direct responses. Teachers can use twitter as a part of their PLN, to network with other professionals and gain ideas for their classroom. DIIGO would allow students to save websites for things such as projects while teachers can save valuable information for teaching ideas and professional development, with a tagging system that makes the information easy to find and recover.

Animoto (https://animoto.com/) is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to create videos and slideshows that would be great for a classroom. The website is very easy to navigate and is suited for presentations or video creation. A teacher could use this website to create class presentations while students could use it in a video project to splice together clips and add music.

I think that Augmented Reality is the technological tool that has the biggest potential for future education. Augmented Reality allows the user to be submersed into a computer generated world that transports the user from the real world through the control of ones senses. This type of technology could be used greatly in the classroom for students to get a type of first hand experience with things that maybe very unfamiliar to them. One example of this might be a teacher using this in a history lesson on China and then allowing the students to get a first hand look at the landscape of country and the location that actual historical events took place.