Already in the first half of this semester, I have learned about many different Web 2.0 tools and their potential for use in the classroom, but what happens when this semester is over? The assigned materials we have been using (text book, websites, videos, etc.) are a great starting point for thinking about specific examples of ways to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, but what about the tools not mentioned in this course, or those not even invented yet? As 21st century teachers, we need to be able to evaluate new and different Web 2.0 tools and get creative with finding ways to incorporate them into classroom teaching. 

To evaluate a Web 2.0 tool, one must consider how it could be used to support teaching, learning, or productivity, the logistics of managing the tool, and potential obstacles with using the tool as well as methods to overcome those obstacles. For practice with evaluating Web 2.0 tools, I chose to evaluate an app called Padlet. Padlet is an online interactive bulletin board where people can easily share thoughts, comments, ideas, and even multimedia elements such as YouTube videos. 

In my classroom, I can use Padlet to get my students talking about and interacting with music outside of the 45 minutes per week that I have with them. For example, I have seen some Music classes in which teachers use their physical bulletin board space to allow students to use sticky notes to post music-related questions that might not be related to the specific topic of the day, or that they might not otherwise have time to ask. However, I feel like this still takes up too much precious in-class time for students to write out these sticky notes. Plus, I really like the idea of students continuing the conversation and thought process about Music after they have left the four walls of my classroom. 

So, I could use Padlet as an online version of this idea. I could embed a Padlet wall on my blog or class website for a specific topic, such as "What do you want to know about Beethoven?" Students could post different questions like "Did he have a cat?" Either I could try to answer them, or perhaps other students might see the questions, become interested themselves, conduct their own research, and begin answering their peer's questions. 

Because my objective in using this tool is for students to use it outside of my classroom, monitoring responses would be a big responsibility. Whether it is monitoring my own students' comments or those from someone outside my school wishing to collaborate, I would need to make sure the comments are appropriate and on-topic. With my classroom blog, I have comments set up to require my approval before they can be publicly visible. This would not be the case with Padlet. However, Padlet offers a few privacy options that might be able to help. I could set up the wall to be password-protected so that only my students, to whom I would give the password, would be able to post. I can also set up notifications so that Padlet automatically sends me an email when a new post is added to the wall. This would help me monitor comments in real time without having to watch the wall like a hawk 24/7. 

Creative Commons is a type of copyright license in which the owner allows anyone to use his/her work for certain purposes. In other words, instead of "all rights reserved," Creative Commons allows for "some rights reserved." The need for Creative Commons came in response to both a change in copyright law that thenceforth made all works protected under copyright the moment they are created, and also to the advent of the sharing and creating power of Web 2.0. According to a video from Creative Commons, this type of license allows works to be "shared, reused, and built upon by the rest of the world" without making the rest of the world ask permission to do so first - the permission is already granted up front. 

The Creative Commons logo can be found on many different websites, although I previously did not know what it meant. Here, I am using the Creative Commons logo under the guideline that it links back to the Creative Commons website. 

I think Creative Commons can have a great impact on student learning. First, students using Creative Commons materials may pause and think about the source of their material, the collaborative nature of the Internet, and copyright law in general. When students create projects using Creative Commons materials, they may become more excited and vested in their work, knowing that they are contributing their own ideas to the creativity of people around the world. 

I currently use images from Google Image search and video clips from YouTube in my teaching, but after learning about Creative Commons I will be sure to find sources that have Creative Commons licenses. If they don't, I may begin to spend more time seeking permissions from the owners of these materials. 

On the other side of the coin, I myself like to share my own work or my student's work on my classroom blog and other public arenas. As a General Music teacher, I like the idea of sharing recordings of my students' in-class performances for others to hear. Of course, I make sure that the songs we use for these recordings are from the public domain or are original compositions, either by myself or my students. I like the idea of adding a (free) Creative Commons license to these recordings and other original materials so that others can take our ideas and expand on them. However, a potential negative of opening up these materials for others' use is if someone were to take our work and put a negative or inappropriate spin on it. My priority would be protecting my students and the integrity of their work. 

Many sites now make it easy to access materials with Creative Commons licenses. For example, an entire section of Flickr is devoted to searching for photos with Creative Commons licenses. Using this section of the site, I was quickly able to find interesting and thought-provoking pictures of various musical instruments like the one seen below. The Creative Commons section of Flickr would be a great place to introduce the concept of Creative Commons to my students, particularly if I were to embed that learning activity into a larger project such as student-created presentations on the different instrument families. 
David Jakes has a lot of other great ideas on how to incorporate Flickr into the classroom.

Social bookmarking is a way to store, organize, and share links on the web. There are many advantages to using a social bookmarking tool online rather than using a traditional bookmarking tool within a browser. First, the social bookmarking websites can be accessed from any computer at any time, rather than on a single browser on a single computer. Second, many of these sites include a tagging feature, which helps the user organize a large number of websites into categories. Third, social bookmarking sites are just that - social! They allow users to share their links with other users, and in turn they can search for websites bookmarked by others, whether on a particular topic or just for browsing purposes. This is tremendously helpful in researching a particular topic, because you can use the work of others to find sites and do part of the research for you (Richardson, 2010, p. 90). 

Two of the most popular social bookmarking sites are Diigo and Delicious. After exploring both these sites, I have decided that I prefer the ease and user-friendliness of Delicious to Diigo's more complex system. While Diigo's features of annotation, sticky notes, and highlights are neat, I prefer the more streamlined features of Delicious, especially if I were to have my elementary-aged students join in using the tool (more on that later). Being an avid Twitter user, I was already familiar with the concepts of @usernames and #hashtags. Delicious operates in much the same way. I also like how you can cross reference tags on Delicious by finding websites with more than one tag attached, or by user plus tags. The Delicious toolbar extension is also a handy tool for keeping the bookmarking easy and convenient.

I would love to use Delicious with the other General Music teachers in my county. Often we as Music teachers are alone in our buildings, so any way to connect ideas and resources with other Music teachers is always appreciated. For my students, my Delicious page would be an easy place for them go to access videos, websites, and other resources I've shown them in class. Or, I could hand over the reins to my students and allow them to bookmark websites of interest related to a particular topic (Richardson, 2010, p. 96). Mike Forder suggests taking this idea a step further - when a student finds a website he/she wants to bookmark, then that student can use his/her own tag, such as lastname_portfolio. In this way, each student can create a portfolio of links without having to create individual student accounts. This is a great idea for my young students. 

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Publishers.

The term "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian phrase "wiki-wiki", meaning "quick". Wikis on the Web are sites that can be edited quickly and easily from any location, and in many cases, by anybody. Wikis can come in many different forms and serve many different purposes. The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia, which is an online encyclopedia to which anyone in the world can contribute. However, wikis can be used for many other purposes. For education alone, there can be many different types: 

By nature, wikis are collaborative spaces to which anyone can contribute their own knowledge. Richardson (201) explains that when students are the ones contributing to and editing this store of knowledge, it can help foster "a sense of responsibility and ownership for the site" (p. 61) and provides a space for students to explore and practice skills and concepts such as "open-source software, community collaboration, respect for people's ideas, intellectual property and public domain, and much more" (p. 63). Wikis adhere to the philosophy that this type of collaboration creates results that are greater than the sum of its parts (p. 57). 

This online collaboration can sometimes lead to issues with online vandalism, where anyone can come in and edit the information incorrectly or even maliciously. Luckily, there are a few safeguards in place to ensure these online mischief makers do not cause too much damage. First, most wikis come with a feature that lets the users track all the changes made throughout the history of the wiki. If needed, the wiki can be simply reset to what it looked like before a bad edit was made. Second, wikis can be set to different access settings. They can either be public, where anyone can read and edit the site; private, where only selected users have access to edit and see the site; or protected, where anyone can access the wiki, but only selected members can edit the information. For classroom purposes, I like the idea of a protected wiki the most. I would want only my students and other approved collaborators such as other teachers or approved classrooms to be able to edit the information, but I would also want the information to be readily available to others so that my students can show off their learning and contributions. 

The best way to understand how wikis can work in the classroom is to visit some real wikis used by real students! One simple wiki called Schools in the Past was created by and for a first grade classroom to learn what school was like many years ago. The students interviewed their grandparents on several different topics such as playgrounds, libraries, class size, and school rules. The students were able to not only record their own results, but also see their fellow students' findings and compare them to what their own grandparents had said all in one single, collaborative space. I like this wiki because it shows that students of almost any age can use them - they do not have to be overly complicated. However, I noticed that this wiki was set to public access, because when I pressed the edit button I had access to editing the whole site. As I said previously, I would probably set my class wiki to protected access. I also noticed that there was only one member listed in the Members section, presumably the teacher herself. I wonder, then, how the teacher was able to assess each student's contribution. Did the students submit the information to the teacher, who then typed it into the site? This would make sense given that the students are so young, but then are the students reaching the full potential of editing the site themselves? I would probably have my students create their own accounts so that they could each contribute to the site, I could assess their contributions using the Recent Changes tool, and the students would have access to edit other parts of the site as well. 

This Go West wiki was created by and for a third grade classroom learning about the westward expansion and the Oregon Trail. I liked how there were different pages covering an array of topics - clothing, wagon, hardship and diseases, etc. Students contributed by creating graphic organizers, timelines, and even games and puzzles. The result was a comprehensive resource that covered much information on the topic, again by and for the students. This wiki is set to protected access, but there are only three members, presumably the two teachers and a student account. From what I could gather, the students probably all had editing privileges on the site via the student account and some shared password. The teachers were able to assess the students' contributions because they put their name on the sections they created (timeline by Benjamin, graphic organizer by Janie). However, I did not like that each section was created by individual students instead of through collaboration. I also did not like that there was one single student account, because it could possibly allow Benjamin to edit Janie's information without being caught, with no accountability to any one person. This would be another benefit to having individual student accounts. 

The Discovery Utopia wiki is an example of amazing things that can happen when you give students autonomy on a wiki. Seventh and eighth grade students used a template covering many different areas of society (culture, industry, government, infrastructure) to explain their idea of a utopian society. The students then had to use the wiki as a platform to debate their ideas and come to a consensus on the laws and norms of an ideal utopian society. Not only that, the students then had to follow the very same laws and rules they created as they continued to work on the wiki. I like how there were designated students that others could go to for help with editing and contributing (whether this was the teacher's idea or the result of the utopian laws, I do not know). The wiki is under protected access, and there are 51 registered users, presumably the teacher and the students. There are links to real-life failed utopian societies, and there is a list of books that the students are studying to guide their learning. The students even had a page to debate whether or not they should be graded using a rubric. It is all quite impressive. I do have to say, it is a little overwhelming to think how much work the teacher - and especially the students - put into the creation of this wiki. I think I would want to start much smaller. 

Starting small is exactly what Vicki Davis did when she introduced wikis to her computer science class. She had students research and create definitions of Web 2.0 terms and post them to her class wiki, then had the students go back and make comments on other sections to give the students experience and practice with the different features of a wiki. I think this is a great way to introduce wikis to both the students and myself. For example, I might start a Music class wiki and have students contribute information about different composers. Students could find, contribute, and edit information as they find it, and also add videos or recordings, photos, images of the sheet music, etc. 


Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Publishers.