Do you remember the first time you used the internet or email? I remember about 11 years ago thinking email was about the coolest ever. We had a floppy disk (well, it wasn’t floppy but whatever) that we used at any computer (probably in the Media Center – now computer labs 106 & 109), to connect and check our accounts. I also remember sitting after school in lab 106 poking around on Webcrawler (the Google of the day) finding lesson ideas, not sure where they came from, but excited about seeing what somebody else’s ideas were.
“Way back when,” websites relating to education seemed to be designed primarily by the government or educational institutions and they were one-way streets: from them to you (if you found them). We started to explore places we could not have easily visited before e.g. the Louvre or Washington D.C., and students started turning to the Internet as a place of information when conducting research (so we designed a way to cite webpages). At this point in the Internet’s life, however, the average computer user could not easily generate content. It was a “Read Only” web a.k.a. Web 1.0.
The Internet has evolved. Now, existing along side with (and in some cases far overshadowing) the “traditional webpages,” are websites which allow users to easily contribute to content published on websites online and use web-based tools to produce and share works they create completely online. The video below (1:32) shows one example of how Web 2.0 is changing the world.
Next week (well, after Spring Break), part 2 of “Welcome to Web 2.0” will begin our exploration of specific Web 2.0 tools available to us as educators to use in our classroom.
The second video? It is just for fun on a Friday – definitely on my YouTube Top 10 favorites! ( And it is only 16 seconds long!).
Happy Friday and happy spring break! ☺ Wendy
No Time to Sleep 