Web 2.0 Cocktail

The ECIS conference in Madrid has presented me with many inspiring and enlightening lectures and workshops amid a flow of high expertise and know-how. The entitled workshop Web 2.0 Cocktail enticed me and was exactly what it advertised to be: a cocktail: short 'n' sweet, creating a buzz and leaving you wanting more.

A great mix of teachers and IT directors from international schools in France, Czech Rep, Austria and Quatar gave the audience a brief lowdown on what's moving and shaking online in terms of the woed and much talked about web 2.0 and how to incorporate it in your lessons and use it as a pedagogical tool in a responsible and efficient way.

A range of resources were revealed as well as a great amount of online sites were discussed and presented. Social networking websites like Ning, Linkend, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook and Second Life were given attention and examples were given on how teachers have used these virtual environments to initiate student-generated projects across the globe. International students in Prague had an ongoing project with two schools in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, on Ning where they posted videocasts, communicated on IM and collaborated on essays.

The inspiring Julie Lindsay, Head of IT at Qatar Academy, focused on wikis and blogs in the classroom. She pinpointed the incredible wave of pedagogical tools in the surge of the web 2.0 and mentioned resources for adventurous teachers such as Mashable, Five Sites, Go2Web2.0, and Atomic Learning. Mrs. Lindsay has spent the past years on research and utilization of wikis in schools - wikis that work - for student-based project work. A great place to start is Wikispaces for teachers, whereas PBWiki and WetPaint can be great starting points as well. Mrs. Lindsay did close her contribution to the Web 2.0 cocktail session with a tribute to Twitter and the curious phenomenon of miniblogging - oddly enough I was the only one in the crowd twittering.

Chris Chater had a nice run-through on Audio 2.0 and excellent web tools for the music teacher. The cute and funny Flashy Horses from Sweden is definitely an online classic. Mr. Chater did devote most of his time to the value of podcasts in teaching, and pulled out of hi sleeve online resources like Podcasting Tools, Odeo, Podproducer and the very interesting newcomer Gabcast - a no-nonsese way of podcasting directly from your mobile phone to the web.

On an end note Google Docs and Zoho were discussed. Particularly interesting was Barbara Stefanics' keynote on the cautious first steps to using web 2.0. tools in the classroom. She had her class set up an Gmail account each before she opened a document in Google Docs and invited them all in. She posted questions and her 12 students responded in real time to them. A genuine act of dynamic word processing was unfolding - and that's just the beginning.

There's a lot of hype on the sexiness of web 2.0., but used in the right ways for the right purposes it might very well be the transitional bridge into the 21st century that flabbergasted teachers have been looking for.