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Motivate and Engage Students with Web 2.0 Teaching Tools

Hook even the most reluctant learners with Web 2.0 teaching tools. Boost your students' academic achievement with these Web 2.0 applications. Revitalize your lessons by integrating these instructional technology tools into your teaching plans.

Web 2.0 sites come and go. Many are not designed as instructional technology. I want to share with you Web 2.0 sites that can be used as teaching tools. These sites are ones that have worked for me, my students, and other teachers. I have discovered that Web 2.0 teaching tools can provide compelling teaching and learning opportunities. 

What is Web 2.0

A simple definition of Web 2.0 is the “Read/Write Web.” Originally, the Internet was a place to locate information - mainly a "Read Only Web." As the Internet slowly changed, web sites were developed that let people "write" and share information. Today’s Web 2.0 sites, like Facebook and Wikipedia, enable people to communicate and collaborate. 

Educational Challenges

Educators face many challenges today. They must adapt to a generation of students who have grown up using the Web.

Teachers must learn and teach information literacy that includes effectively using the Internet. These Web 2.0 applications can help students develop the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century world.

21st Century Skills

We live in a global, knowledge-based economy. Students must master vital 21st century skills to survive in the world beyond the classroom. They must be able to
• research using the Internet,
• assess information,
• work collaboratively,
• communicate effectively,
• think critically and creatively.

I have organized the Web 2.0 sites using some of these 21st century skills. Many of the Web 2.0 applications incorporate more than one skill. These tools can help us realize the different ways critical 21st century skills can be developed in the classroom.

Join me in exploring the Web 2.0 teaching tools and resources on this site. The ready-to-use teaching resources will help you get started. If you are hesitant, don’t be. I’ve taught for over 25 years and am not a technology expert. If I can do it, you can do it.

Here’s a little tip:
Think about a lesson or unit that you teach that bores you or your students. Look for a Web 2.0 teaching tool that you can use with that lesson. It could be just the thing to excite you and your students while making the learning more enjoyable (and meaningful) for everyone!

ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. Like the language lab console of old, it's focused on the practice of oral/aural language, but at its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com and the University of Oregon: Voiceboards, LiveChat, and Quizzes and Surveys. Our newest tool, TCast, allows teachers to record and place audio or video files anywhere in a lesson--in 3 easy steps. Each of these tools really opens up the scope and sequence of lessons centered around spoken language tasks.

Creating media-rich lessons in ANVILL is simple and straightforward. There are templates for audio, video, and image tasks; there are also tools for text-based discussions like blogs and forums. Whether you're linking to existing web content, or uploading your own texts or media files, ANVILL simplifies the process.

ANVILL is aimed at both teachers in traditional face-to-face situations as well as at those who are doing distance or hybrid courses. Its course management tools provide a simple means of enrolling and communicating with students and making curriculum web-accessible. We think you'll find that ANVILL is quite flexible, and permits the kind of extra listening and speaking practice that language students need so much.

ANVILL is a research project of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon. The software is currently in use at UO and many other sites around the US. Thanks to our National Foreign Language Resource Center partners at CASLS, we are able to offer ANVILL to educators at no cost. Here is an overview of its features. If you think it would be helpful to you and your students, sign up for an account (at right). We're looking for language teachers at all levels to use it and tell us what they think. (Teachers sign up for accounts, and then register their own students.)

It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but all signs point to the impending demise of delicious.com.

What are we going to do with all of our bookmarks?

There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on that are below, but first, here’s a list of options for your post-Delicious.com bookmarking.

10 Delicious.com Alternatives

(in alphabetical order)

Blinklist: Blinklist has some of the same features that Delicious has, like quick bookmarking and sharing with others. Pages can be read offline, as well. But … there doesn’t appear to be a way to import bookmarks, so this is probably a non-starter for existing Delicious.com users.

Connotea: The site advertises itself as a service for “researchers, clinicians, and scientists.” And many of the features are specifically designed for academic users. But it acts in much the same way Delicious does: find a web page, add it to your “library,” add keywords for later retrieval, and so forth.

Diigo: Diigo lets you save web page bookmarks, files, images, and much more. It bills itself as a personal information management service. You can bookmark web pages via a Diigo toolbar and/or a bookmarklet in your web browser.

Evernote: Like Diigo, Evernote isn’t just for bookmarking web pages — but that’s one of the things you can do, and I know a few fellow search marketers who are already using Evernote instead of Delicious. You can save URLs or just text clippings from a web page.

Faves.com: This is not a pure bookmarking site, but a site that acts as a combination of, say, Delicious and Google Reader. When you register, Faves.com installs its toolbar in your browser and that’s how you save content. Your Faves.com home page includes the links that friends have saved (if you choose to connect to others who use the site), making it as much about content discovery as saving.

Google Bookmarks: You may already be using this without even knowing it. If you’ve ever starred a search result on Google.com or starred a place in Google Maps/Places, it’s already been saved into Google Bookmarks. You can also add sites to Google Bookmarks via the Google Toolbar. In fact, here’s a list of the various ways to add pages to Google Bookmarks. And yes, it supports importing bookmarks.

Historio.us: This bookmarking site even has a .us TLD like Delicious.com used to have. Histori.us offers one-click saving, makes snapshots of web pages when you save them, offers tagging and full-text search. It does support importing bookmarks from other sites. There’s a limited free account option, but if you have more than 300 bookmarks, you’ll need to use one of the paid accounts.

Instapaper: If you’re a heavy Delicious.com user, this one’s probably not for you. Instapaper allows you to save web pages for reading at a later time, but creator Marco Ament warns that it’s not “optimized for keeping track of thousands of pages. This isn’t the right tool to collect, categorize, tag, filter, and search the contents of every web page you’ve ever found.”

Pinboard.in: This is not a free service. It offers a basic service for about $7 (one-time fee) or an archival service for $25 a year. The archival service stores copies of your bookmarks and provides full-text searching. Conveniently, you can see a Pinboard vs. Delicious comparison to help you decide if this is the right service for you.

Zootool: Like some of the others above, Zootool isn’t just for URLs; you can save images, documents, and other web-based content. Saving is done via a bookmarklet and, unlike Delicious.com’s blue links, Zootool saves your content as thumbnails. It offers organizing tools like tagging, too.

How to Export Delicious.com Bookmarks

You’ll probably want/need to export your Delicious.com bookmarks in order to get the most out of any of the services above. I’ve mentioned cases where importing is or isn’t available, at least based on the sites’ help pages.

Fortunately, exporting Delicious bookmarks is easy:

1. Login to Delicious and go to your “Settings” page.

2. Under the “Bookmarks” heading, look for the “Export / Backup Bookmarks” link.

Delicious will save your bookmarks as an HTML file, and you have the option to include your existing tags and/or notes.

Your turn: If there are other Delicious.com alternatives that I’ve missed above, or if you have experience with any of the sites above (good or bad), let us know in the comments so that all readers can benefit.

Postscript (December 17, 2010)

See our new post indicating Delicious.com may not be closing down: Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All.

Related Topics: Features: General | Top News | Yahoo: Delicious

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About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

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