1) Wikis allow for collaborative knowledge construction as students can edit and contribute to online texts together. The challenge is getting teachers and schools onboard. 2) RSS feeds allow students to efficiently follow various blogs and news sources, helping them learn and gather information for reports. 3) Social networking sites, bookmarking services, Flickr, and podcasting provide new ways for students to learn, interact, and demonstrate their knowledge through multimedia projects. 4) The rise of new literacies from powerful web tools represents a shift where students must learn to both consume and publish/edit information online, and where learning is a social, collaborative process not confined to the classroom.

1. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other
Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms
By Will Richardson
Report on chapters 4-9

2. Wikis
• From Hawaiian – wiki-wiki meaning “quick”
• Ward Cunningham (1995) looking for easy
authoring tool (spur others to publish)
• Vital – every student needs to learn
collaboration
• Tsunami entry – posted w/in 9 hrs, by 48 hrs it
had been edited 1200 times & included
graphics such as video

3. • Concept that all together is smarter than anyone
alone
• Collaborative construction of knowledge & truth
• Wiki pedia spurred revolution of other wikis:
– Recipes, travel, song lyrics, etc
• Challenge in schools – frowned on by teachers (?)
and librarians. (districts!)
• Create online text for your curriculum that you &
students can edit and contribute to
• CA Open Source Textbook Project
• South Africa – entire national High School curr. In
a wiki!

4. • Wikibooks – 10K text modules in 2 yrs
• Learn about editing, and collaboration, but
also publishing and writing as well
• Holocaust Wiki Project
• Teacher’s Lounge
• Peanut Butter Wiki -- good place to start
• www.pbwiki.com – work w/ students on a wiki
• Seedwiki.com wikicities.com

5. RSS – new killer app for educators
• Real Simple Syndication
• Start today and teach it tomorrow
• Blogs (and other sites) create XML code
(similar to HTML)
• Referred to as “feed” (as in newsfeed)
• This code makes it possible to subscribe to the
feed and get the content w/o visiting the blog
• Aggregator – collects all info on one site

6. • Read more content, from more sites, in less
time
• Bloglines – aggregator – sign up
• Links on blogs or news sites to click to
subscribe
• Use to monitor your students’ weblogs rather
than check all of them!
• Have students use them to view news sources
– For reports, etc
– Can combine RSS feeds into one (all of a class’s)

7. Social Web
• Learn together
• Interaction w/ others internationally to learn
• 43things.com – connect w/ other who want to
learn same things
• Bookmarking services – tag marks and share
• Del.icio.us
• Furl.net

8. Flickr and Podcasting
• Using digital images
– Photo field trips
– Analyze a picture from history
– Post pics of a topic your students studied
– Geobloggers (all flickr images tagged with latitude
and longitude)
Podcasting
creation of amateur radio
Ipod is a mobile radio station
Exapanded to multimedia – netflix, etc

9. • Create an educational radio station
• Listen to one of the many stations out there
already
• Some accompany online magazines
• Screen casting – capture what students do on
a computer and add audio narration to it

10. What it all Means
• New literacies have been created
– Must be able to publish to fully utilize the
read/write web
– Be editors as well as readers – check for accuracy
– Give students skills to manage the info they collect
• A number of “big shifts”
– Open contents
– 24/7 learning
– Construction of knowledge socially, collaboratively

11. • Teaching is conversation, not lecture (interact)
• “where” learning – not as important to know
“what” but to know “where” to find it
• Reading no longer passive – must interact,
converse, and be active
• The web as a notebook – collect notes in
many forms – graphics, audio, video, etc
• Write in ways other than text – genres such as
audio, video, etc
• Mastery is the product, not the test – use web
and various tools to create

12. • Contribution is the ultimate goal, not
completion – this is a shift in thinking from the
past
– Use read/write web
– Students look at work in a whole new way – work
isn’t meant just for the teacher but for the whole
world to see (created on the web)
• This is JUST THE BEGINNING!
– Realtionship w/ the internet is still developing,
particularly in education.