Thing 11: Web 2.0 Tools

The Web 2.0 Tool that I explored was Scoop.it From the get go, it reminded me a lot of Delicious, which was not what I was expecting. It was really easy to register for Scoop.it; not only was it free, but I received my confirmation email almost instantaneously, so I didn't have to wait around to start exploring the site.

The first thing that you do once you have logged into Scoop.it, is you add the 'scoop it' button to your toolbar which allows you to add websites to your specified topic. Since we will be starting a unit on the Middle East soon, I set up a topic for Terrorism and some of my key words were jihad, Middle East, 9/11 and Islam. Once I hit the button 'curate,' then I had over 100 websites pop up that brought up those key words. Obviously the more key words that you suggest, the more websites that will appear.

I think that this website would be really helpful for finding sources for research papers (especially in Social Studies classes) as well as allowing students to look up additional information on different topics. I could see this being extremely useful if you have the technology available to your students. This is even something that students can access at home. I like how you can manage the sources as well as filter the sources by additional keywords. Again I think this would be extremely beneficial for your upper grade levels. We write two research papers in World Geography and for the second one students have to gather their own sources, so I am going to look into using this for them to 'scoop' their sources into one location.

The second Web 2.0 Tool that I looked up was Powtown. I thought that this sounded really interesting especially because it makes your presentations animated! I know with high school students that listening to 7 different teachers lecture over the course of their day can be really exhausting and tedious, so I think that this could be a great way to amp up your PowerPoint presentations and make them more interactive for the students. Although it would be a bit time consuming to re-do all of your PowerPoint's, this could be a lot of fun.

When I have more time, I would like to further explore Powtown and actually create some more interactive PowerPoint's for my students to take notes from.