Web 2.0 in education.

According to Rouse (2015), Web 2.0 is the online technology that it is used nowadays allowing more collaboration and interaction than its previous version, web 1.0. With web 1.0 people only could see content online and download it. Instead, web 2.0 allows users to edit other person’s works, to interact with other users and to work collaboratively online. So it can be said that an important characteristic of web 2.0 that differentiate it from web 1.0 is its social function. Types of social media sites and applications include forums, microblogging, social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Google +), social bookmarking, social curation (Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit), and wikis (Wikipedia).

Web 2.0 tools:

One tool that teachers can use in their classroom, is Voki. Taking into account Kemp (2013), this is a free application in which students and teachers can create their own talking avatar and then this characters can be uploaded to the social medias. Teachers can use this tool to give feedback to students, to design tasks in which students have to record themselves to give an oral presentation, for example, so as to not feel nervous speaking in front of the class. Besides, by listening to their recordings, students can improve pronunciation. This is the link to Voki: http://www.voki.com/

An example of a Voki avatar. 

Another web 2.0 tool is Word It Out, an application to create word clouds by pasting and original text. The application generates a word cloud containing the words in the text. Then users can choose the font, the colours, the layout, the size of the word cloud. Also, one can decide how many times you want a word to appear and the total number of words to be included in the word cloud. In some cases, the word that is more frequent in the original text is the largest in the word cloud. The final work can be shared to the world or saved in a computer. Here is the link to access Word It Out: https://worditout.com/

Here are more examples of web 2.0 in education:

These are some of the great amount of tools that web 2.0 offers teachers to implement in their classrooms and make the teaching/learning process more original, engaging and funny. You should really try to make use of these technologies that facilitates our work and are accessible to all of us.

References:

- Kemp, C (2013). What is voki and how do I use it in the classroom. Retrieved from  http://mrkempnz.com/2013/03/what-is-voki-and-how-do-i-use-it-in-the-classroom.html
- Rouse, M (2015). Web 2.0. Retrieved from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Web-20-or-Web-2