How to Spend Your Summer Vacation
If you’re still not sure how to “break in” to the Web 2.0 world — through blogging, eNewsletters, social bookmarking, using online document systems or other ways — you might want to follow the advice that educational tech expert and blogger Wesley Fryer recently gave a group of teachers in a one-hour after-school staff development workshop. Realizing that many of the teachers in his audience had not heard of Web 2.0 technology and would be overwhelmed if he tried to cover it all in the time he had, Fryer suggested that they take small steps by investigating a few of Web 2.0 tools and using them “personally” over the summer. I like his suggestions, so I’m sharing them with you. If you’re a school official or a school communications professional, you might consider attacking it this way. Even if you’re a 12-month employee, summers provide most of us with time to catch up on some knowledge. (#3 and #5 are specifically geared toward teacher software, so you might want to skip those.)
1. Join a local (state) online learning community.
2. Learn about wikis and create one.
3. Create and share digital stories with VoiceThread.
4. Start using social bookmarking.
5. Join an online professional learning community like Classroom 2.0, and attend the 2007 K-12 Online Conference.
6. Share photos with family and friends on Flickr.
7. Watch and share outstanding videos online.
8. Videoconference with family and friends using Skype or iChat.
9. Create and read a customized digital “newspaper”. (With Google Reader.)
10. Learn to text message from a patient teenager.Write, Create, and Collaborate Online
If you’re still attaching Word documents to emails, sending them back and forth between you and the superintendent, business official or principals you represent, you’re bogged down in emails and attachments. And which version is the right one? With online writing and collaborating software like Google Docs and Writewith, you can work collaboratively on any document from any computer. You can simply go into your mutual Google Docs folder and work. And most online software applications permit you both to see and track any revisions. The best way to illustrate how Google Docs works is with this video from the clever folks at Commoncraft.com:
Using Wordpress or Blogger as an eNewsletter
Here’s a great way to communicate with your constituents, via an eNewsletter created on a blog platform. Carol Franks-Randall, Superintendent of Schools in Elmsford, NY, who’s always ahead of the curve when it comes to communicating, created a Wordpress blog, “Excellence in Elmsford,” two years ago that she now emails to community members as an eNewsletter. She has turned off the comments, making the blog her own creation over which she has total control. It’s a great way to keep in touch, control the message and even circumvent the local press by managing her own news. It’s a great idea for any school district struggling with public image or dealing with an antagonistic or absent local press.
Catch the Train Before it Leaves the Station
If you’re a school official reluctant to enter the Internet’s Web 2.0 revolution, perhaps this video by Professor Mike Wesch of Kansas State University will persuade you to climb onto this train before it’s too late.
I Have Gas…
Another Web 2.0 innovation, for those of us infuriated about endlessly rising gas prices.
provides you with the latest gas prices at your neighborhood gas stations. You simply enter your zip code or hometown, and a list and a map pops up with the lowest to highest gas prices and the locations of local service stations. When I used it today, gas prices in my region ranged from a low of $3.30 to a high of $3.79, for Regular gas. That’s quite a difference, and for anyone penny-pinching the gas thing these days, this website (and others like it) is a godsend. Because it’s a Web 2.0 site, it depends on “user-generated” content, meaning real-time and updated contributions from its members. So far, gaswatch has 163,000 “member spotters,” and 409,000 prices were entered onto the website this week.
Gaswatch also identifies those prices that are less than 12 hours old with a green gas tank, prices less than 24 hours old with an orange rank, and prices that are more than 24 hours old with a red tank.
