Yippee! I’ve finished! I have thoroughly enjoyed my journey. I have learned a lot and also discovered that I already knew a lot about Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has made in-roads into my life, both personally and professionally. I’m a blog addict (I have four, including this one), am now in charge of up-dating our school web-site and am constantly giving staff gentle nudges in the right direction. Let’s hope it all pays off.

What I’ll keep using-

• blogs
• Flickr
• Bloglines
• Facebook
• Google Maps
• iGoogle
• del.icio.us
• wikis
• YouTube and TeacherTube
• Project Gutenberg

Thank you for this great learning opportunity. See you again in cyberspace

LibriVox will also be a great source of material for our visually impaired students.

I personally don’t like to use E-books or audiobooks myself. I must admit that the tactile experience of a beautifully bound book can’t be beaten. I just love to touch and smell those wonderful pages that lead me on fantastic journeys. I’m a touchy-feely sort of gal

Now for my feelings and opinions about virtual worlds.

Second Life reminds me of a series of books I read by Tad Williams about a virtual world, Otherland, that took two generations of masterminds to create to ultimately download the consciousness’ of the evil Grail Brotherhood so that they could achieve immortality and rule the world forever. Science fiction sometimes mirrors reality.

I find virtual worlds disorienting – even though I thoroughly enjoy other aspects of the web and Web 2.0 virtual realities are not for me. I ended feeling like my head is spinning. I have participated in online conferences before for a university course and always come away confused and feeling a little lost and bamboozled. I always find it difficult to keep up with conversations.

I know people who use Second Life for work and play and love it. Each to there own. I can see the advantages for education; worldwide conferences and distance education courses are two that come to mind. Just isn’t for me.

Enjoy.

I am now in charge of the school website and am intending to use podcasts in the site. Time to learn how to actually create them and imbed them in our website. Should be fun. I’ll probably leave it until after the school holidays, as I want to do a professional job and I’m thinking that it will take time to master making the actually podcasts.

Podcasts are definitely worthwhile. The copyright issues need to be cleared up though for schools wanting students to access podcats from places like the ABC. The ABC grants you a licence to download these audio files only for your personal, non-commercial use. There is as yet no allowance for educational use.

Resources That I Found Useful or Interesting about Podcasts

7 Things you Should Know About Podcasts by Educause Connect

Creating Podcasts – What am I Allowed to Do? This fact sheet covers the creation of podcasts in schools.

Using Podcasts – What am I Allowed to Do? This fact sheet covers the use of podcasts in schools.

A little side note – every time that I typed the word ‘podcast’ for the post I really typed ‘podcat’ 

I didn’t have a problem adding a search box on my blog. It was a simple as pasting the code in, and it works fine. I may use it on one of my other blogs too, with a different search roll, to add a search roll on the types of fiction that I enjoy.

I am at times amazed and frustrated by Wikipedia. The amount of information there is monumental and I have had a great time researching topics of interest to me. However, I am always aware of how subjective the material that I am reading is. Just who put it there? What makes them so knowledgeable about it? Students who use Wikipedia should realise that it is a starting point that provides background material, much like a real, tactile encyclopedia volume. All facts that students present in assessment tasks should be verified and come from reliable sources.

I can see the possibilities for a subject guide wiki to provide library users with a variety of reliable information for their assessment tasks. With a larger base of people, not just the library staff, adding resources, this could be a great place for teachers and students to visit to find reference material, library books and web sites for a large variety of topics. Being a bit of a control freak, I must admit that I would prefer to be able to moderate the wiki to decide what stays and goes. However, that may change in time.

The Library 2.0 movement is as a result of Web 2.0. We already use a web-based OPAC that gives the users access to the library catalogue from anywhere that they have Internet access. They can log-in and view their loans, reserve items, create their own resource lists and email information from the catalogue to anyone. It is not yet a two-way street though. It would be fantastic if the users could add tags to resources and download their own reviews to the catalogue, though perhaps it may need moderating.

Libraries need to keep pace with Web 2.0 and library software needs to move with the times. A more prominent web presence wouldn’t hurt libraries, though it needs to be managed and utilised properly, not just done for the sake of doing.

Read “What is Library 2.0? A Guide” for a definition of Library 2.0 in relation to teenagers.

Users can wander the streets of Australian cities and towns and take a virtual tour of icons such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Australian War Memorial. The tour is a snapshot in time, but will it progress to real time in the future? Who knows where the technology could take us? Big brother, an invasion of privacy or a great new mapping technology?

Delicious have updated their site and changed some of the functions and the appearance slightly. Check out the changes at Delicious. It’s supposed to be faster, easier to learn and more delightful to use and look at. I really like Delicious and have even taught my ten-year-old daughter how to use it and she loves it. She’ll never use old-fashioned bookmarks again.