Which Web2.0 Tool to Use?

One of the nice things about my job is that I get to exerience and try out different Web2.0 Tools and then try to figure out whether they will work well in the classroom.  Fortunately, as promising ones become available, there are several teachers I push towards trying out these new finds.  When they “buy-in” it becomes apparent that it will be a tool modeling as we do professional development training and encourage teachers to use as they use technology tools.

This morning Donna Baker, a Technology Integration Coach, sent me an email from one of our librarians, Rebecca Jackman, about Zotero.

Becky wrote, “I think sharing our best resources is a great idea.  The single best thing I’ve found this year is Zotero.  This is a Firefox addon that allows students to gather and annotate the resources they are using for research projects.  It is free, easy to use, and really helpful.  Once it is installed (free download) you have a link at the bottom of the browser window – when clicked it opens a half window at the bottom for saving bookmarks and making notes, bibliography references, whatever you need.  Click again and it goes away but saves all your sources.  Last week, one of my students discovered the Export link, which makes it possible to conduct research at school, export the Zotero file, mail it to yourself, then import to Zotero on your home computer.  Could also be done with social bookmarking perhaps, but I find Zotero much more friendly for the research process.  The kids rave about it – it is one of those “hey, what’s that – that’s cool” apps that once introduced, has spread from student to student.

Now if our students are already using it, and they find it beneficial for research and writing; then it is a tool that needs to be investigated.  So, I spent part of this morning in Firefox, downloading Zotero (I downloaded the 1.5 Beta version).  Once I restarted Firefox, after the plugin was installed, Zotera now lives in my bottom task bar.  With this new version your notes and tags go from computer to computer with you.

If you have a few minutes it is well worth your time to investigate.  Another thing I really like about the website is that they have a video right on the front page that walks you through exactly how the process works and additional help if you need it.

After this latest find I went in search of a webpage that I have referenced often.  Go2Web2 is a Web2.0 directory.  No matter what tool you are searching for there are many flavors that all work similiarly and yet with subtle differences.

Will Richardson and I were in an email discussion this week over the reason he uses Pageflakes as opposed to iGoogle.  I have seen a webex not long ago and he was using many Google tools, but where I would have natively gone to iGoogle, he demonstrated Pageflakes.  His response was that it was the tool he found first, and it did what he needed it to do.

As we develop Professional Development here in the Clarksville-Montgomery Co. School District we will more and more be introducing new tools to make teaching and learning easier.  But, we will be working with what the tool accomplishes.  It will be up to the teachers to choose which flavor best meets their needs.

Everyday new web tools come on the internet and I always enjoy when a particular tool make a task or job easier.  And tomorrow… there will be yet another great new tool our there for me to love!