5 Web 2.0 and Concept Mapping

Web 2.0 is a wonderful addition because students can collaborate with each other and share ideas. Web 2.0 includes social media, youtube, wikis, google docs, and more. Web 2.0 can be a blessing and a curse in a classroom. Although it gives students a broader range of technological dynamics to work with, it also gives room for students to have negative interactions with each other and outsiders. Facebook and other social media sites are a great way to interact and reconnect with people but I do not believe that they should be heavily relied on in a classroom. Students often use sites like this as their main way to cyberbully other students. Adult predators could also prey on students through these sites by pretending to be someone they are not. A social media site like Edmodo that could be better monitored by a teacher would be a more viable alternative. Wikis and Google Docs are Web 2.0 products that I strongly believe in. With this technology, students can collaborate and work on group project more efficiently and on their own time. I personally prefer Google Docs over Wikis because the educator can tell which student entered what information. This helps reduce the likelihood that one student will complete the work on their own while the rest of the group's members slack off.

Another Web 2.0 tool used in class to enhance teaching and student productivity is Diigo. Diigo is an online tool that allows users to save and organize online resources, annotate web pages and other documents while browsing, organize links and references, and share this work with other group members. This site would be very helpful while drafting a research paper. I always find it to be a bit stressful to have numerous sites saved in the favorites tab of my browser for reference while I am researching and then when I go back to that site a week or two later, while I am writing my paper, I have completely forgotten what information or quote I was going to pull from that source. Diigo could help eliminate that struggle because I could highlight and annotate each web page so I know what it was that I found interesting about that source.

Diigo could also be used to help student complete a group project. Long gone are the days where a group of five students have to hover around a single computer for hours to complete a group project. We all know how extremely difficult it is to align all of our hectic schedules so that we can meet up to work on a group project. Most likely, only half of the group will actually show up at the designated time. With Diigo students can easily share the links and annotated sources that they have discovered in order to collaborate more freely. Diigo would also be helpful with e-books and other online text resources. The child development course that I am taking requires an e-text as opposed to a physical textbook and I strongly dislike the fact that I am unable to easily make small notes in it or highlight important topic. Diigo could help minimize the level of stress I feel of not having a physical copy of the text book

Last week we used Webspiration classrooms to create concept maps based on world war 1. Before beginning the assignment I was a bit stressed out just thinking about it. It seemed like it was going to be a tedious and time consuming assignment. I have only ever created something similar to a concept map online used the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint and it was not fun. To my surprise, Webspiration was extremely easy to use. It does most of the work for you, you just have to enter the text. I found it difficult to put all of the information on the war into one map without it looking cluttered so I created two concept maps and a map that resembled a timeline. I am pretty impressed with how they turned out and will definitely use this source in the future. I would love to create study guides and graphics for my future students who are visual learners using this tool. The only thing I would do next time to improve my concept map is take more free reign creatively with it.