Web 2.0 in the Classroom

This week I have been taking a class sponsored by our school district called "Infusing Technology into the Classroom."  When I had signed up for the class, I was unsure whether the material would bring anything new to my class.  As I posted earlier, our school is wireless, we have an outstanding computer lab with 60 iMacs, and personally I have about 15 more computers in my classroom (that's one for every two kids--sounds great, but my goal is one to one).  We use several applications on a daily basis that are Internet-based; what more could I do?

This answer is LOTS!

I'll keep this post focussed, but suffice it to say that the thrust of the class was Web 2.0.  How do we get our kids to produce content and put it out there in the cloud?  How do we make learning interactive?

For my class project, I developed a lesson where kids will make movie trailers for books they have read. I got the idea when I was reading the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  Suzanne Collins used to work in the entertainment industry (here in Los Angeles we just call it "the Industry").  Her book reads like a movie script, so I googled for a Hunger Games trailer.  Lots of trailers came up in my search, but they were all made by kids.  Apparently the Hunger Games film is only in development, so no filming has been done, and they haven't even assigned a cast.  Zillions of kids out there who were in love with the book decided to make the trailers themselves.

I won't bother you with the lesson plan itself, but here is my student sample for "Little Red Riding Hood."  I created this in the omnipresent PowerPoint, which is an application I've never used before.  Usually I create slide shows in iMovie, but I wanted to try something new.  Anyway, I struggled endlessly to get this posted online.  Ultimately I converted the PowerPoint file into a movie file--that was easy.  But a huge problem is that our school district has a firewall that prevents us from accessing Youtube.  Many of the sites I was using required a Youtube version of the video.  On my classroom blog (Kidblog.org), the movie file was too big because the max allowed is 10 MB.  Is there no way to get this video online?

Little Red Riding Hood Movie Trailer from Gina Amodeo on Vimeo.

Anyway, finally I uploaded the video onto Vimeo.com (my new favorite website). Sadly, somewhere along the line (I think when I created a movie from PowerPoint), my sound became out of synch with the video, so the soundtrack is about 10 seconds too short and some of the slides are onscreen for too long.  In the future, I'll just use iMovie from the start so I can control the synch.  No matter--troubleshooting is all part of the learning experience, and I look forward to the moment when my kids solve that problem for me.

Hopefully you get the idea.  Instead of writing the same old boring book report, you can show your understanding of the story, or sell the story to another potential reader, through video--by sharing it with an audience.  Others can add their thoughts through comments or by follow-up videos.  The possibilities are endless, the learning is meaningful, the process is fun.