Symbaloo: Visual Bookmarking

A great Web 2 tool for keeping all of your bookmarks in one place. This is a tool the allows you collect and store all of your bookmarks in a visual way. It makes for a quick and easy internet experience. It is also a great look for your browser homepage. This image is only about 15 % of your screen. You get about 70 bookmarking tiles on the screen at once but course you can set up links to other pages of connected sites.

http://www.symbaloo.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/

Jason Hackenwerth Case Study

This is a case study that was used as a digital textbook for a Yr 10 Visual Arts class. The students were instrumental in the design of both the layout of the document as well as the activities. This was a unit that all students were actively engaged in, simply because they felt they had ownership of the material. We had done a lot of work on learning styles, differentiation and types of assessment. This became a sample case that tried to incorporate many of the principles from these three areas. This was a great learning experience for both the students and me.

Open publication - Free publishing - More web 2.0 ttols