Some Web 2.0 for Educational Technology

I’ve been continuing to try and learn (and keep up with) new technologies I think will be useful in the classroom, as I do I post them on my resource page for such items.  There are a few I wanted to point to for use in the technologically aware classroom.  These are free and fairly basic to use, there are of course many other things that do similar or the same functions but these are the ones I’ve tested and am currently using on a regular basis.  There are also other lists of great web 2.0 stuff that I didn’t bother going into here so as to not overwhelm those who need the basics.  Here is a list from JR Rozko and here is an old post of mine.

1. For free Blogging Software, I find WordPress.com to be the absolute best, but if you want the standard free blogging software go to google’s blogger.

2. Writely – free word processor, blogging API and collaboration tool.
This application is great because its free (though I think they may have closed invitations for the time being), offers tons of editing options, allows you to tag your documents, and blog directly from their interface to your blogger account offering you a way to easily back up your posts.

3. Performancing is a free plugin for Firefox, which also allows you to easily write, edit, and publish your blog posts to a number of the major blogging services including wordpress.

3. 30boxes.net – a free online calendar that is really easy to use.  It allows you to sync your desktop calendars from programs such as outlook and ical so you can keep everything together.  It also allows you to invite others to share calendars something great for groups trying to collaborate times to get together.

4. Tada – a place where you can make endless lists of things to do!  This is also a great tool for collaboration, because it allows you to make categories and lists of tasks that need accomplished.  People can use RSS to get a feed of the list or be invited to share it.  Besides this its an easy way to keep track of all those assignments that you have to do.

5. Box.net is storage that allows you to save your documents, photos, mp3’s, etc, on the internet either for backup or for primary use.  You no longer need to carry around “thumb drives??? or worse floppy disks. They have a wonderful free version, which I am using, it gives you 1gb of storage space (unless you refer 5 friends then you get 5gb).  1gb of space will hold all your papers (or back them up) for a really long time.  A great feature they offer is a way to share documents which could be useful for sharing notes from a class, or working on a project together.  They also have a desktop syncing tool, which will make your computer and the box.net server work as if its a local hard drive when connected to the internet.  I was going to write a review of it but there is really no need because Paul Stamatiou has written a great one and so has my friend from Malone Ryan Battles.

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