# 4 What's this Web2 Business? An update

Reading and browsing through the course's supplied links and my own search, made me realise the enormity of possible Web2 Tools available for teachers, librarians and students.

Basically these online tools of the 21 century engage learners and allow us (teachers) to meet them in their own world of digital experiences as in BJ Nesbitt's a vision of K-12 students today:

Students learning experiences have been significantly altered in very recent times. Jut taking the time to watch these kinds of videos begs the question: 'Is today's education system keeping up to the dramatic changes in student's thinking patterns and expectations?

Marc Prensky's Digital Native/Digital Immigrant debate challenges me, as a teacher of today's education, to learn to communicate in the language and style of our students without forsaking sound pedagogical practices.

Here are some of the Web2 Tools that I have toyed with and finding the experience exciting as I consider what the impact of real time collaborative software is on students learning and reflections.

I have used fotobabble for a narration experiment in a Kindergarten class. I mentored three teachers and introduced this concept to them and we encouraged some students to comment on their photo of their work. Heavy hands on for this age group but an exciting journey and great possibilities for older students.

Lingt was another experiment in one of my schools where we have a majority of students from the Gumbaynggirr people. We couldn't use it for homework activities because most families did not have the internet at home, but as a school activity it was really popular for that term. Students practiced their pronunciation with Lingt.

I used Voicethreads myself as I interacted with the IWB Revolution Ning. I could leave comments on the movie embedded into the site. I can see the possibilities in usingVoicethreads to allow students to share their creative ideas.

There are a few other ideas that Ana Maria presented in her published that I would love to play around with in the next few weeks.

Has anyone used ISSUU? Its a great tool to publish PDFs and embedd the code into your blog or wiki. This is a great e-book called Web Tools

Open publication - Free publishing - More webtools

Basically, I see that Web2 Tools offer opportunities to better engage our learners. How and Why? Well Web2 offers a social and interactive platform to make connections with other people - and its free

I can see that Web2 Tools help teachers make our teaching and learning and assessing more effective. You don't even need a good computer - in fact you can do a lot of communicating on your phone.

Web2 is ubiquitous and it is within our reach!

I learnt that it is offers a fresh new experience loaded with possibilities to interact with websites, social platforms, to collaborate, to share, to learn. And all you need is a bit of interest, some opportunities, a few eager students and an internet connection and of course - something to say.

Cloud computing has also proved to be a storage saviour, with documents, images, presentations and videos centrally stored and accessed by collaborators.

So many ideas, so many opportunities and so many tools to pack in my tool box! Opportunities like this course certainly gives one that little reminder to browse around and experiment with a few Web2 Tools.