Swansea

slideshare.net is a website I use to post my students' powerpoint presentations. With this website you use your own version of powerpoint and then attach it to your account in slideshare.net. It's free and easy to create a account at slideshare.net. Kids make more of an effort to produce quality work when they realize how many people can actually see their projects. It's a Web 2.0 tool because others can make comments about the powerpoints.

Audacity is free software you can download to your computer. I use it to record my students' voices. They may be reading a story they wrote or reading a book they learned how to read. After recording a voice you can also add snippets of music for the beginning or the end. You can even fade the music while the student is reading. The music can be found at freeplaymusic.com This recording can then be converted to an MP3 file, which is basically a podcast. I created a wiki for this project because you have to have a place to put the podcasts. You can listen to my students' stories they wrote about fall by going to smartones.wikispaces.com. I now understand that Audacity is not a Web 2.0 tool. However, wikispaces is!

As you may already know, you can also add powerpoint presentations to a wiki. So, I added a page to the smartones wiki for my 4th graders projects on animal research. So now, at smartones you'll find podcasts by my students and powerpoints by my students. Stay tuned!

It seems to me that if we are using and sharing our ideas about Web 2.0 tools then this fairly new term needs to be defined. Wikipedia says that the term first came into use in 2004. This term "is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing" A Web 2.0 site allows it's user to interact with other users or to change website content.