Wordle

Wordle is an application that allows the user to create word clouds from selected text. You can either nominate a website address, a del.icio.us account, you can just cut and paste the text or you can type it into the box. This is a great way for students to visually represent how the words in a piece of text also have a heirarchy.

http://www.wordle.net/create

Animoto

This is a little Web 2.0 tool that automatically makes 30 second, high resolution videos of your photos or images. This can be embedded into wikis, blogs or websites. There are multiple styles and scaffolds to chose from that will make it look like you have the skills to put together multimedia MTV style clips. These can be displayed within a frame or as full screen presentations.

http://animoto.com/education

Glogster

Lots of people have heard of Glogster. It is a web 2.0 tool that allows you to construct interactive posters. It is great for students too and only requires a simple email login. The beauty of this tool is that it is truly multimedia. You can include images, text, music and video all on the one doucment. It is a digital collage that can have embedded hotspots that are activated by the viewer. This is literally a drag and drop tool that kids can be using within 5 minutes of introducing them to it. I just love the fact that students have to source the media, evaluate it's effectiveness and re-present it within a graphic context. A great way to achieve a deeper level of understanding than just using a traditional cut and paste collage.

http://edu.glogster.com/

Voicethread - collaboration

Voicethread is the perfect Web 2.0 tool to collect and share comments from your classes about a single or set of source materials. The source material can be text, images or videos. You can ask a question of them or ask them to reflect on a specific aspect of the image. The students can then type a comment, annotate the source material or even draw arrows and lines to emphasise their comments. The beauty of this tool is that all the comments show on the one page. This would be the quickest way ever to mark homework. I love this idea! If you register as an educator you can access some of the features normally reserved for the paid version.

http://voicethread.com

Open publication - Free publishing - More web2

Xtranormal: Text-to-Movie

This is a fun little Web 2 tool that allows you to type in a script and it will automatically turn it into an animated movie for you. You can then set camera angles, camera changes, choose characters and even accents. It is a great tool for getting students to work with and creating dialogue or even to get them to see two points of view.

It takes a little longer to get the hang of all the available features of this program but you can still create scripted animations in minutes. Apart from all the obvious benefits of this web tool, this is just great FUN.

http://www.xtranormal.com/

PREZI - The Zooming Presentation

This has to be my all time faviourite Web 2.0 tool. It is called the zooming presenter and for good reason. This is a non-linear presentation tool that is like powerpoint on steroids. It is perfect for making connections between disparate items and looking at the big picture. This is because you can actually zoom into and out off the canvas space. This allows the audience to make the overarching connections or conversely to focus of one particular piece of information.

It is intuitive to use and students can be creating presentations within minutes. The tool is continuing to add features and different styles to its already impressive library. You can access your presentation anywhere you have access to the internet or you can download your presentation onto your own computer. This is so simple it is beautiful!

http://prezi.com/

Vuvox - The Digital Collage

Vuvox is a great Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create a continuous collage of images. The tool also allows you to create hotspots. A hotspot is an image that activates a text box, a piece of music or even a video. This is very effective when you need to add another layer of complexity to the information.  This tool is effective for creating narratives or even presenting numerous sources materials within the one image.

This may be a way that you present information to a class or it might be a task for students to collect, collate, evaluate and construct the collage to present a specific point of view. Most collages can be construct within a very short period of time once the images have been collected.

http://www.vuvox.com/