Blog Post #5

I think that Blogs and Wikis are the most useful in the classroom setting because they seem to be the most professional and allow students to interact with one another in the safest manner. Both of these can be easily monitored and edited by the school teacher. I think that Twitter is the one that is the least useful. Although students can use this to follow researchers, scientists and other famous figures; there are a lot of non professional people on Twitter as well. It is one of the harder tools to monitor and this site also can be a platform for cyberbullying.

I was not in class on Monday due to illness so I am not sure of what Web 2.0 tools were discussed but I found this one online. This is Story Bird (http://storybird.com/). This site is used to tell fun, interesting stories in a virtual sense. You can also include artwork. I liked this website because I thought it would be a good activity to complete in a Mad Lib's sense where the class fills in the blanks to then create an entire story. Because it is online, it would then be easy to add to the classroom newsletter so parents can see it and then share it with other family members. It is an extremely unique site and seems a lot of fun! Here is a link to an example of a story http://storybird.com/books/jasons-journey/. 

I think that the technology advancement that holds the biggest promise for education is smart boards. These boards allow students to interact with textbooks in a virtual sense. It also creates an easy way to keep the students engaged rather than having them sit on their desks and work out of a textbook. It is also fairly easy to use and understand! I have seen teachers successfully use this in grades as young as Kindergarten.