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e-Learning Summit Breakout Session 4: E-Engage: "Doing" School 2.0

Wendy Wolfe from Totino-Grace spoke about integrating Web 2.0 in a K-12 environment.
She talked about students wanting to be "entertained", but maybe a better word would be "engaged".
"For some reason they want to teach us stuff that any fool can look up in a book."
-Calvin

Educating the Net Generation-
Majority of secondary classes-15 seconds or fewer are devoted to group discussion. 85% of instruction is Teacher centered.

Trend-with high stakes testing, instruction is becoming more teacher centered, not less.
New Blooms taxonomy-Creating has replaced Evaluation at the top.

Wiki's and Blogs allow students to create and to publish.
She shared information about the wiki she created for her classes. She saw wikis as a tool for virtually everything she does on the Web.
One of the projects had the students creating a video with Animoto. Here is a video that Jen Buckley from South View created using this tool.

Comic Generators
She then talked about cartoon generators, the most popular being Toondoo and Comiqs.
With the increased interest in Graphic Novels, these tools provide kids with the opportunity to create their own. Toondoo has a feature that allows you to upload your own photos to add to the cartoon. They have added some protection features as well so that you can keep images private or share only with friends.

Web Based Presentations
Splashcast is a Web based presentation tool that allows you to embed your presentations on the Web.
Spresent-has some nice features, but is unavailable until June. There are image and annimation features that leave Ppt in the dust! Included is a scrolling credit of all images used from the Web.

Concept Maps
Gliffy.com blogged about before, here, can allow you to create concept maps and floorplans. World Language teachers can have kids label floorplans in Gliffy in the language they are teaching. One issue is that Gliffy connects to Yahoo for image searches, unfortunately, they don't include the URL for the image.

Podcasting
Gcast-allows you to create your podcast on your phone.
iTunes
GarageBand
Audacity

Other
Read, Write, Think-Online desktop publishing- can create trading cards on famous people

Wolfe's presentation was enthusiastic and engaging, and told me that we were on the right track with our Web 2.0 initiatives.

She ended by putting in a plug for the K-12 Online Conference.

Resource Wiki for the presentation

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