Web 2.0 Tools for My Classroom

It is difficult to think about the huge array of available technology as a special education teacher in an intermediate school setting. This is because one of our students' main struggles is with basic educational tools such as reading and writing, math, and critical thinking skills. We spend the majority of time working on hand writing skills to improve and be legible before worrying about typing skills through digital devices. I know technology is becoming more and more prevalent but I think everyone would agree our next generation still needs to be able to write with a pencil or pen and have others be able to understand and read what they are writing. Nevertheless, technology is changing the landscape of education and everyone in the field needs to be looking for ways to work with the digital natives that are coming into our classrooms. Plus with the development of the internet, there are more tools to aid our students than ever before. So when thinking about how I would go about selecting the technologies for my classroom, first I wanted to make sure I picked web applications that would be standards of the internet and looked to avoid fad websites. The other thing I took into consideration was where my students are in their educational journeys. In 5^th and 6^th grade we're still doing a lot of taking in information and understanding knowledge and how to apply it. I feel each one of the handpicked tools selected can play a pivotal role in the curriculum and education of the students I am servicing.

To start, I wanted to keep two programs that Riverside already uses. Scholastic software is a program that offers several different academic applications each student has access to once they log into their student account through any school computer. We use multiple products from Scholastic: READ180, SYSTEM44, SRI, Reading Counts, FastMath, and Study Jams. All of these programs deal with comprehension (assessment) and remediation to bring students up to grade level standards. The assessments Scholastic has are ones our special education department uses to determine classroom placement and what kind of interventions we will use for our students. The other advantage from our teacher's perspective is the data collection Scholastic offers on all programs, which is incredibly helpful and user friendly. The other web tool Riverside uses is Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS). Our staff uses Angel LMS to create Virtual Learning Environments for online learning but also even simpler tasks such as online assignment postings and notifications for upcoming tests or quizzes. Students are given an electronic portfolio of their digital work. These accounts are also there for the parents to check in on how their student is preforming in their classes. Angel helps our school connect teachers to students and their guardians and that's a huge asset for us. A third program that I feel is an excellent web resource is Google Docs. It is a great web-based office program that is offered free through Google. It allows students to create and edit documents online while collaborating with other students. What is nice about it is you can blend spreadsheet with Microsoft (MS) Word document work. For my classroom this would come in very handy for writing papers because here students could write from both school and from home without having to worry about losing their work from place to place. Next, Prezi and PowerPoint are both web tools that help students put presentations together. Prezi is the "new kid on the block" so to speak. But really there are several differences between the two that make them both useful. PowerPoint typically is more text driven, where Prezi has a much greater visual impact. Prezi also allows you to see a topic wind down a craniological path and yet in the next turn it can visually pull back and show you a big picture structure to a topic because the presentation is on one page. MS PowerPoint is a slideshow presentation that is an application which has a few more tools but needs to be saved to a zip drive or a student's account. Prezi is a free online tool which works well for the students who have a hard time holding on to things from home to school and back and forth. Another great resource is Wikipedia, which is a free, web-based, collaborative, encyclopedia. The pro to this web tool is how user friendly it can be to read and break down topics. The con is that because it's a collaborative website there are times when things are written that are not accurate. This is getting better and they are getting better and better at monitoring and insuring what is being written has a reliable resource to it, but it's still not perfect. Nevertheless, I feel students can easily find quick, relevant facts on a lot of educational topics from George Washington to Ratio. When I think back to the beginning of the web 2.0 era I think Google. I know Yahoo and AOL were technically here first and they all started the change together, but Google changed the game. So this is why I have chosen Google Search as one of the web tools for my classroom. Google Search is the most used search engine of the internet and can be immensely helpful when researching a topic. The downside of Google is the results are sometimes only as good as the search term and depending on if the word has synonyms or connoted meanings, can bring about some unwanted results. The next web tool I wanted our students to work with is Evernote. Evernote has two types, Evernote Premium which is a paid version, or the more restricted, yet free version. At Riverside we would be fine using the free version. What this web tool provides is help with note taking. A lot of my students struggle quite a bit with organization and neatness. This tool can help create nice clean written notes and sort the notes in files for better storage keeping. Another advantage and one of the other aspects Evernote brings to the table is a better way of being "Green." We as a school try and be as eco-friendly as we can; recycling and saving paper wherever possible. Evernote allows our students to keep their notes digitally and not have to use a bunch of paper or note cards for note taking. One of the final resources I've selected is Wordle, which is a web tool that creates tag clouds. Tag clouds are visual representations for text data, typically used to depict keyword words from a topic. It's usually several keywords with each word being depicted by different fonts and/or colors depending on how relevant the word is. A classic example we already have built into our curriculum for 5^th graders is a map. Cites, states, and towns are labeled in different colors and sizes. It's a different type of tag cloud than what we will create from Wordle but this unit is a great lead-in for our students to learn how to create from Wordle. From there our students can build Wordles for multiple subjects when needed. Youtube was my last selection. Not because it's not a good tool, but primarily because so much other non-educational stuff can be found on it there are times when it can be distracting not only for the students but the school staff too. However, videos are a great way to bring topics alive. For example we just read a compare and contrast story about baseball and cricket. Youtube has several good videos showing cricket and all I had to do was type in "how to play cricket." Within several minutes my students now have a much better understanding of what they are reading and how to better compare and contrast the two sports.

All these web tools can be very useful even for my special education department at the intermediate school. Obviously some of these tools will be used more than others. But each new generation is becoming more and more technologically advanced and schools need to aid our students so that technology becomes a useful educational tool, much more than just a place to play games or communicate with friends.