My Favorite Web 2.0 Tools

Web 2.0 as I understand it came around while I was still living in Japan.  I can still remember where and when I first heard about it.  I was driving to a friend's house in the country listening to a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air when one of their critics began talking about checking out old concert videos on a site called YouTube that I'd never heard of before.  Once at my friend's house I borrowed his computer to see what this YouTube was all about, and was immediately hooked. 

There seem to be two basic ideas behind Web 2.0, one is that content is created by the users, not mediated to a central company that you pay for their service.  This is the idea behind YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook.  People create their own entertainment and share it with everyone else.  The other idea, which I think is more important, is the idea of the internet being the location for a computer's applications and storage, and the computer being a terminal with which you access them.  This is the idea on which GoogleDocs, to give one example, is based.  The reason this is so significant is that users are no longer necessarily tied to one specific computer.  If you begin a file on GoogleDocs at home, you can continue to work on it at a friend's house or the library or the office without having to carry anything with you.  

Having worked in my own classroom for nearly a year now, the advantages of this to education are pretty attractive.  One of the biggest issues we had with using technology last year was file storage and transfer.  Every child had his or her own thumb-drive, but as with anything else, they are easily lost and many projects were lost this way.  With some Mac users and some PC users we also had compatibility issues between different types of software and different operating systems.  This year we are in the process of shifting everyone to GoogleDocs, and though this process isn't yet complete, I think this is going to make a big difference in fixing some of the issues we dealt with last year.

One tool that looks interesting to me is screentoaster.com.  I really like the idea of creating a short demonstration of how to complete a task ahead of time and having that presentation available for my students online in case one of them was either absent or needed to see it again to understand what I was trying to show.  Like anything else, it will take some getting used to, but I see a lot of potential for this sort of tool.