Jounal Entry #3

Journal Entry #3

What is Web 2.0? By Gina Hughes, The Techie Diva


This article talks about Web 2.0, which is what people consider “the second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online” (Wikipedia).

To get more in-depth information, I visited two of the websites the author listed. One was www.pbs.org which had an article titled “What is Web 2.0, and Should You Care”, by Mark Glaser. This was a very informative article on how Web 2.0 came about and got named. Apparently, a guy named Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Publishing named Web 2.0. Another source claims that Web 2.0 is just a trendy way to name an improved form of the existing web (like they do with software upgrades). At any rate, everyone seems to agree that Web 2.0 is the second generation of the web that allows people to collaborate and share information online. An example of a Web 2.0 company would be www.myspace.com. An example of the old-fashioned Web 1.0 company would be www.amazon.com.

The other site I visited was www.edugadget.com, which is geared toward educators and talks about a variety of new technological things that are of use for teachers. It provided a link to an outstanding science pod cast “The Brain Food Pod Cast” that would be a very useful Web 2.0 tool for teachers. Another interactive tool talked about here, that would qualify as being part of Web 2.0 is the use of publishing the class calendar to the class’ wiki and blog. The author states that online calendaring, instead of being a read-only syllabus, allows a two-way (read/write) relationship among the participants.

So, what is Web 2.0 and why should I care? Web 2.0 is, again, composed of interactive websites as opposed to the information only websites of the original World Wide Web. I should care because there are a multitude of ways I can use Web 2.0 in my classroom.

How can I use Web 2.0 in my classroom? As stated earlier, one very basic way is to have a class blog where I can post my calendar and allow parents and students to interactively schedule meetings with me and “chat” with me about upcoming assignments. Other ways to use Web 2.0 in my classroom is to take advantage of cool educational websites, like the science pod cast mentioned earlier. In addition, there are sites like www.pbs.org, www.nationalgeographic.com, and some others I found while doing my filamentality assignment.